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The SPJ Code of Ethics is voluntarily embraced by thousands of journalists, regardless of place or platform, and is widely used in newsrooms and classrooms as a guide for ethical behavior. The code is intended not as a set of "rules" but as a resource for ethical decision-making. It is not — nor can it be under the First Amendment — legally enforceable. For an expanded explanation, please follow this link .

For journalism instructors and others interested in presenting ethical dilemmas for debate and discussion, SPJ has a useful resource. We've been collecting a number of case studies for use in workshops. The Ethics AdviceLine operated by the Chicago Headline Club and Loyola University also has provided a number of examples. There seems to be no shortage of ethical issues in journalism these days. Please feel free to use these examples in your classes, speeches, columns, workshops or other modes of communication.

Kobe Bryant’s Past: A Tweet Too Soon? On January 26, 2020, Kobe Bryant died at the age of 41 in a helicopter crash in the Los Angeles area. While the majority of social media praised Bryant after his death, within a few hours after the story broke, Felicia Sonmez, a reporter for The Washington Post , tweeted a link to an article from 2003 about the allegations of sexual assault against Bryant. The question: Is there a limit to truth-telling? How long (if at all) should a journalist wait after a person’s death before resurfacing sensitive information about their past?

A controversial apology After photographs of a speech and protests at Northwestern University appeared on the university's newspaper's website, some of the participants contacted the newspaper to complain. It became a “firestorm,” — first from students who felt victimized, and then, after the newspaper apologized, from journalists and others who accused the newspaper of apologizing for simply doing its job. The question: Is an apology the appropriate response? Is there something else the student journalists should have done?

Using the ‘Holocaust’ Metaphor People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, is a nonprofit animal rights organization known for its controversial approach to communications and public relations. In 2003, PETA launched a new campaign, named “Holocaust on Your Plate,” that compares the slaughter of animals for human use to the murder of 6 million Jews in WWII. The question: Is “Holocaust on Your Plate” ethically wrong or a truthful comparison?

Aaargh! Pirates! (and the Press) As collections of songs, studio recordings from an upcoming album or merely unreleased demos, are leaked online, these outlets cover the leak with a breaking story or a blog post. But they don’t stop there. Rolling Stone and Billboard often also will include a link within the story to listen to the songs that were leaked. The question: If Billboard and Rolling Stone are essentially pointing readers in the right direction, to the leaked music, are they not aiding in helping the Internet community find the material and consume it?

Reigning on the Parade Frank Whelan, a features writer who also wrote a history column for the Allentown, Pennsylvania, Morning Call , took part in a gay rights parade in June 2006 and stirred up a classic ethical dilemma. The situation raises any number of questions about what is and isn’t a conflict of interest. The question: What should the “consequences” be for Frank Whelan?

Controversy over a Concert Three former members of the Eagles rock band came to Denver during the 2004 election campaign to raise money for a U.S. Senate candidate, Democrat Ken Salazar. John Temple, editor and publisher of the Rocky Mountain News, advised his reporters not to go to the fundraising concerts. The question: Is it fair to ask newspaper staffers — or employees at other news media, for that matter — not to attend events that may have a political purpose? Are the rules different for different jobs at the news outlet?

Deep Throat, and His Motive The Watergate story is considered perhaps American journalism’s defining accomplishment. Two intrepid young reporters for The Washington Post , carefully verifying and expanding upon information given to them by sources they went to great lengths to protect, revealed brutally damaging information about one of the most powerful figures on Earth, the American president. The question: Is protecting a source more important than revealing all the relevant information about a news story?

When Sources Won’t Talk The SPJ Code of Ethics offers guidance on at least three aspects of this dilemma. “Test the accuracy of information from all sources and exercise care to avoid inadvertent error.” One source was not sufficient in revealing this information. The question: How could the editors maintain credibility and remain fair to both sides yet find solid sources for a news tip with inflammatory allegations?

A Suspect “Confession” John Mark Karr, 41, was arrested in mid-August in Bangkok, Thailand, at the request of Colorado and U.S. officials. During questioning, he confessed to the murder of JonBenet Ramsey. Karr was arrested after Michael Tracey, a journalism professor at the University of Colorado, alerted authorities to information he had drawn from e-mails Karr had sent him over the past four years. The question: Do you break a confidence with your source if you think it can solve a murder — or protect children half a world away?

Who’s the “Predator”? “To Catch a Predator,” the ratings-grabbing series on NBC’s Dateline, appeared to catch on with the public. But it also raised serious ethical questions for journalists. The question: If your newspaper or television station were approached by Perverted Justice to participate in a “sting” designed to identify real and potential perverts, should you go along, or say, “No thanks”? Was NBC reporting the news or creating it?

The Media’s Foul Ball The Chicago Cubs in 2003 were five outs from advancing to the World Series for the first time since 1945 when a 26-year-old fan tried to grab a foul ball, preventing outfielder Moises Alou from catching it. The hapless fan's identity was unknown. But he became recognizable through televised replays as the young baby-faced man in glasses, a Cubs baseball cap and earphones who bobbled the ball and was blamed for costing the Cubs a trip to the World Series. The question: Given the potential danger to the man, should he be identified by the media?

Publishing Drunk Drivers’ Photos When readers of The Anderson News picked up the Dec. 31, 1997, issue of the newspaper, stripped across the top of the front page was a New Year’s greeting and a warning. “HAVE A HAPPY NEW YEAR,” the banner read. “But please don’t drink and drive and risk having your picture published.” Readers were referred to the editorial page where White explained that starting in January 1998 the newspaper would publish photographs of all persons convicted of drunken driving in Anderson County. The question: Is this an appropriate policy for a newspaper?

Naming Victims of Sex Crimes On January 8, 2007, 13-year-old Ben Ownby disappeared while walking home from school in Beaufort, Missouri. A tip from a school friend led police on a frantic four-day search that ended unusually happily: the police discovered not only Ben, but another boy as well—15-year-old Shawn Hornbeck, who, four years earlier, had disappeared while riding his bike at the age of 11. Media scrutiny on Shawn’s years of captivity became intense. The question: Question: Should children who are thought to be the victims of sexual abuse ever be named in the media? What should be done about the continued use of names of kidnap victims who are later found to be sexual assault victims? Should use of their names be discontinued at that point?

A Self-Serving Leak San Francisco Chronicle reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams were widely praised for their stories about sports figures involved with steroids. They turned their investigation into a very successful book, Game of Shadows . And they won the admiration of fellow journalists because they were willing to go to prison to protect the source who had leaked testimony to them from the grand jury investigating the BALCO sports-and-steroids. Their source, however, was not quite so noble. The question: Should the two reporters have continued to protect this key source even after he admitted to lying? Should they have promised confidentiality in the first place?

The Times and Jayson Blair Jayson Blair advanced quickly during his tenure at The New York Times , where he was hired as a full-time staff writer after his internship there and others at The Boston Globe and The Washington Post . Even accusations of inaccuracy and a series of corrections to his reports on Washington, D.C.-area sniper attacks did not stop Blair from moving on to national coverage of the war in Iraq. But when suspicions arose over his reports on military families, an internal review found that he was fabricating material and communicating with editors from his Brooklyn apartment — or within the Times building — rather than from outside New York. The question: How does the Times investigate problems and correct policies that allowed the Blair scandal to happen?

Cooperating with the Government It began on Jan. 18, 2005, and ended two weeks later after the longest prison standoff in recent U.S. history. The question: Should your media outlet go along with the state’s request not to release the information?

Offensive Images Caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad didn’t cause much of a stir when they were first published in September 2005. But when they were republished in early 2006, after Muslim leaders called attention to the 12 images, it set off rioting throughout the Islamic world. Embassies were burned; people were killed. After the rioting and killing started, it was difficult to ignore the cartoons. Question: Do we publish the cartoons or not?

The Sting Perverted-Justice.com is a Web site that can be very convenient for a reporter looking for a good story. But the tactic raises some ethical questions. The Web site scans Internet chat rooms looking for men who can be lured into sexually explicit conversations with invented underage correspondents. Perverted-Justice posts the men’s pictures on its Web site. Is it ethically defensible to employ such a sting tactic? Should you buy into the agenda of an advocacy group — even if it’s an agenda as worthy as this one?

A Media-Savvy Killer Since his first murder in 1974, the “BTK” killer — his own acronym, for “bind, torture, kill” — has sent the Wichita Eagle four letters and one poem. How should a newspaper, or other media outlet, handle communications from someone who says he’s guilty of multiple sensational crimes? And how much should it cooperate with law enforcement authorities?

A Congressman’s Past The (Portland) Oregonian learned that a Democratic member of the U.S. Congress, up for re-election to his fourth term, had been accused by an ex-girlfriend of a sexual assault some 28 years previously. But criminal charges never were filed, and neither the congressman, David Wu, nor his accuser wanted to discuss the case now, only weeks before the 2004 election. Question: Should The Oregonian publish this story?

Using this Process to Craft a Policy It used to be that a reporter would absolutely NEVER let a source check out a story before it appeared. But there has been growing acceptance of the idea that it’s more important to be accurate than to be independent. Do we let sources see what we’re planning to write? And if we do, when?

SPJ News SPJ continues to call for the release of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and all imprisoned journalists Region 7 Mark of Excellence Awards 2023 winners announced Region 1 Mark of Excellence Awards 2023 winners announced

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“Ad”mission of guilt
“Do I stop him?”
Newspaper joins war against drugs
Have I got a deal for you!
Identifying what’s right
Is “Enough!” too much?
Issues of bench and bar
Knowing when to say “when!”
Stop! This is a warning…
Strange bedfellows
Gambling with being first
Making the right ethical choice can mean winning by losing
Playing into a hoaxster’s hands
“They said it first”
Is it news, ad or informercial?
Letter to the editor
Games publishers play
An offer you can refuse
An oily gift horse
Public service . . . or “news-mercials”
As life passes by
Bringing death close
A careless step, a rash of calls
Distortion of reality?
Of life and death
Naked came the rider
“A photo that had to be used”
A picture of controversy
Freedom of political expression
Brother, can you spare some time?
Columnist’s crusade OK with Seattle
Kiss and tell
The making of a govenor
Past but not over
Of publishers and politics
To tell the truth
Truth & Consequences
“Truth boxes”
When journalists become flacks
A book for all journalists who believe
The Billboard Bandit
Food for thought
Grand jury probe
Judgement on journalists
Lessons from an ancient spirit
Lying for the story . . .
Newspaper nabs Atlanta’s Dahmer
One way to a good end
Over the fence
“Psst! Pass it on!”
Rules aren’t neat on Crack Street
“Someone had to be her advocate”
Trial by Fire
Trial by proximity
Using deceit to get the truth
When advocacy is okay
Witness to an execution
Are we our brother’s keeper? . . . You bet we are!
Betraying a trust
Broken promise
“But I thought you were . . . ”
“Can I take it back?”
Competitive disadvantage
Getting it on tape
The great quote question
How to handle suicide threats
Let’s make a deal!
A phone-y issue?
The source wanted out
The story that died in a lie
Thou shalt not break thy promise
Thou shalt not concoct thy quote
Thou shalt not trick thy source
Too good to be true
Vulnerable sources and journalistic responsibility
The way things used to be . . .
When a story just isn’t worth it
When a story source threatens suicide
When public should remain private
The ethics of “outing”
“For personal reasons”
Intruding on grief
Intruding on private pain
Privacy case settled against TV station
Seeing both sides
Two views on “outing”
Unwanted spotlight
Whose right is it anyway?
Other views on the Christine Busalacchi case
The death of a soldier
Firing at Round Rock
A kinder, gentler news media
Operation: Buy yourself a parade
Rallying ’round the flag
“Salute to military” ads canceled
Tell the truth, stay alive
The windbags of war
Absent with no malice
Anonymity for rape victims . . .
An exception to the rule
The boy with a broken heart
Civilly suitable
Creating a victim
“Everyone already knew”
An exceptional case
Innocent victims
Minor infraction
Names make news
Naming a victim
Naming “johns”
Profile of controversy
What the media all missed
Punishing plagiarizers
Sounding an alarm on AIDS
Suffer the children
Anchor’s away
The day the earth stood still
Doing your own ethics audit
Good guys, bad guys and TV news
Is it just me, or . . . ?
The Post’s exam answer story
TV station “teases” suicide
Yanking Doonesbury
The year in review
Colorado media’s option play
Deadly lesson
Deciding which critically ill person gets coverage
When journalists play God . . .
A delicate balance
The Fallen Servant
Handle with care
It’s the principle, really
Killing news
Maybe what seems so right is wrong
On the line
Protest and apology after Daily Beacon story
Red flag for badgering
Sharing the community’s grief
The “super-crip” stereotype
“And then he said *&%*!!!”
When big is not better
When the KKK comes calling
Not the straight story
Agreeing to disagree
All in the family
Family feud
Author! Author!
The Bee that roared
Brewing controversy
Building barriers
Other views from librarians
The ethics of information selling
Close to home
Family ties
How now, sacred cow?
The ties that bind
“Like any other story”
When your newspaper is the news
Not friendly fire
Overdraft on credibility?
The problem is the writing
Written rules can be hazardous
Project censored, sins of omission and the hardest “W” of all – “why”
Risking the newsroom’s image
The Media School

Ethics Case Studies

Ethics cases online.

This set of cases has been created for teachers, researchers, professional journalists and consumers of news to help them explore ethical issues in journalism. The cases raise a variety of ethical problems faced by journalists, including such issues as privacy, conflict of interest, reporter- source relationships, and the role of journalists in their communities.

The initial core of this database comes from a series of cases developed by Barry Bingham, Jr., and published in his newsletter, FineLine. The school is grateful to Bingham for his permission to make these cases available to a wider audience.

You may download cases for classes, research or personal use. Permission is granted for academic use of these cases, including inclusion in course readers for specific college courses. This permission does not extend to the republication of the cases in books, journals or electronic form.

Note: We are indebted to Professor Emeritus David Boeyink, who developed this project several years ago.

Aiding law enforcement

“Ad”mission of guilt: Court-ordered ads raise ethical questions
“Do I stop him?”: Reporter’s arresting question is news
Fairness: A casualty of the anti-drug crusade
Newspaper joins war against drugs: Standard-Times publishes photos of all suspected drug offenders
Have I got a deal for you!: The line between cooperation and collusion
Identifying what’s right: Photographer’s ID used in hostage release
Is “Enough!” too much?: Editors split on anti-drug coupons
Issues of bench and bar: In this case, a TV reporter is the judge
Knowing when to say “when!”: Drawing the line at cooperating with authorities
Stop! This is a warning . . . : Suppressing news at police request
Strange Bedfellows: Federal agents in a TV newsroom

Being first

Gambling with being first: The media drive to score on the Isiah Thomas story
Playing into a hoaxster’s hands: How the Virginia media got suckered
“They said it first”: Is that reason for going for the story?

Bottom-line decisions

Is it news, ad or infomercial?: The line between news and advertising is going, going . . .
Games publishers play: Allowing an advertiser to call the shots
An offer you can refuse: The selling of Cybill to the Enquirer
An oily gift horse: saying “No!” to Exxon
Public service. . .or “news-mercials”: The blending of television news and advertising

Controversial photos

As life passes by: A journalist’s role: watch and wait
Bringing death close: Publishing photographs of human tragedy
A careless step, a rash of calls: “Unusual” photo of AIDS walkathon raises hackles”
Distortion of reality?: “Punk for Peace” photograph draws fire
Of life and death: Photos capture woman’s last moments
“A photo that had to be used”: Anatomy of a newspaper’s decision
A picture of controversy: Pulitzer photos show diverse editorial standards

Covering politics

Freedom of political expression: Do journalists forfeit their right?
Brother, can you spare some time?: TV stations give candidates air time
Columnist’s crusade OK with Seattle Times
Kiss and tell: Publishing details of a mayor’s personal life
The making of a governor: How media fantasy swayed an election
Past but not over: When history collides with the Present
Of publishers and politics: Byline protest threatened at Star Tribune
To tell the truth: Why I didn’t; why I regret it
Truth & Consequences: The public’s right to know . . . at what cost?
“Truth boxes”: Media monitoring of TV campaign ads
When journalists become flacks: Two views on what to do and when to do it

Getting the story

A book for all journalists who believe: Accuracy is our highest ethical debate
The Billboard Bandit: Did the newspaper get graffiti on its reputation
Food for thought: You are what you eat . . . and do
Grand jury probe: TV journalists indicted for illegal dogfight
Judgment on journalists: Do they defiantly put themselves “above the law?”
Lessons from an ancient spirit: Why I participated in a peyote ritual
Lying for the story . . . :Or things they don’t teach in journalism school
Newspaper nabs Atlanta’s Dahmer: Another predator who should’ve been stopped: Was it homophobia?
One way to a good end: Reporter cuts corners to test capital drug program
Over the fence: A case of crossing the line for a story
“Psst! Pass it on!”: Why are journalists spreading rumors?
Rules aren’t neat on Crack Street: Journalists know the rules; they also know that the rules don’t always apply when confronted with life-threatening situations
“Someone had to be her advocate”: A newspaper’s crusade to keep a child’s death from being forgotten
Trial by Fire: Boy “hero” story tests media
Trial by proximity: How close is too close for a jury and a reporter?
Using deceit to get the truth: When there’s just no other way
When advocacy is okay: Access is an acceptable journalist’s cause
White lies: Bending the truth to expose injustice
Witness to an execution: KQED sues to videotape capital punishment

Handling sources

Are we our brother’s keeper? . . . You bet we are!
Betraying a trust: Our story wronged a naive subject
Broken Promise: Breaching a reporter-source confidence
“But I thought you were . . .”: When a source doesn’t know you are a reporter
“Can I take it back?”: Why we told our source ‘yes’
Competitive disadvantage: Business blindsided by unnamed sources
Getting it on tape: What if you don’t tell them?
The great quote question: How much tampering with quotations can journalists ethically do?
Let’s make a deal!: The dangers of trading with sources
A phone-y issue?: Caller ID raises confidentiality questions
The source wanted out: Why our decision was ‘no’
The story that died in a lie: Questions about truthfulness kill publication
Thou shalt not break thy promise: Supreme Court rules on betraying sources’ anonymity
Thou shalt not concoct thy quote: Supreme Court decides on the rules of the quotation game
Thou shalt not trick thy source: Many a slip twixt the promise and the page
Too good to be true: Blowing the whistle on a lying source
Vulnerable sources and journalistic responsibility: Are we our brother’s keeper?
The way things used to be . . . : Who says this new “objectivity” is better?
When a story just isn’t worth it: Holding information to protect a good source
When a story source threatens suicide: “I’m going to kill myself!”

Invading privacy

The ethics of “outing”: Breaking the silence code on homosexuality
“For personal reasons”: Balancing privacy with the right to know
Intruding on grief: Does the public really have a “need to know?”
Intruding on private pain: Emotional TV segment offers hard choice
Seeing both sides: A personal and professional dilemma
Two views on “outing”: When the media do it for you
Two views on “outing”: When you do it yourself
Unwanted Spotlight: When private people become part of a public story
Whose right is it anyway?: Videotape of accident victim raises questions about rights to privacy

Military Issues

The death of a soldier: Hometown decision for hometown hero
Firing at Round Rock: Editor says “unpatriotic” story led to dismissal
A kinder, gentler news media?: Post-war coverage shows sensitivity to families
Operation: Buy yourself a parade: New York papers pitch in for hoopla celebrating hide-and-seek war
Rallying ’round the flag: The press as U.S. propagandists
“Salute to military” ads canceled
Tell the truth, stay alive: In covering a civil war, honesty is the only policy
The windbags of war: Television’s gung-ho coverage of the Persian Gulf situation

Naming newsmakers

Absent with no malice: Omitting part of the story for a reason
Anonymity for rape victims . . . : should the rules change?
An exception to the rule: a decision to change names
The boy with a broken heart: Special problems when juveniles are newsmakers
Civilly suitable: If law requires less, should media reveal more?
Creating a victim: Plot for a fair story may not be foolproof
“Everyone already knew”: A weak excuse for abandoning standards
An exceptional case: Hartford Courant names rape victim
Innocent victims: Naming the guilty . . . but guiltless
Minor infraction: A newspaper’s case for breaking the law
Names make news: One newspaper debates when and why
Naming a victim: When do you break your own rule?
Naming “johns”: Suicide raises ethical questions about policy
Profile of controversy: New York Times reporter defends story on Kennedy rape claimant
What the media all missed: Times reporter finally sets record straight on Palm Beach rape profile
Punishing plagiarizers: Does public exposure fit the sin?
Sounding an alarm on AIDS: Spreading the word about someone who’s spreading the disease
Suffer the Children: Journalists are guilty of child misuse

Sensitive news topics

Colorado media’s option play: Most passed; did they also fumble?
Deadly lesson: Warning about sexual asphyxiation
A delicate balance: Mental breakdowns & news coverage
The Fallen Servant: When a hero is not a hero
Handle with care: Priest murder story required extra sensitivity
It’s the principle, really: Timing and people’s money matter, too
Killing news: Responsible coverage of suicides
Maybe what seems so right is wrong: A medical condition media-generated money can’t cure
On the line: A reporter’s job vs. human decency
Red flag for badgering: Ombudsman takes sportswriter to task
Sharing the community’s grief: Little Rock news coverage of three teen-age suicides
Suffer the children: Was story on molestation worth the human cost?
The “super-crip” stereotype: Press victimization of disabled people
“And then he said *&%*!!!”: When sexist and vulgar remarks are new
When big is not better: Playing down a story for the community good
When the KKK comes calling: What’s the story?
Not the straight story: Can misleading readers ever be justified?

Workplace issues

Agreeing to disagree: How one newspaper handles off-hour activities
All in the family: When a journalist’s spouse creates a conflict of interests
Family feud: Handling conflicts between journalists and partners
Author! Author!: Ethical dilemmas when reporters turn author
The Bee that roared: Taking a stand for editorial independence
Brewing controversy: The commercialization of Linda Ellerbee
Building barriers: The case against financial involvement
Other views from librarians: When interests of client and newsroom conflict
The ethics of information selling: Problems for library reference services
Close to home: When your newsroom is part of the story
Family Ties: When are relationships relationships relevant?
How now, sacred cow?: United Way’s favored treatment by the media
The ties that bind: Publisher’s link to United Way raises questions
“Like any other story”: Can it be when it’s your union vs. your paper?
When your newspaper is the news: Editors discuss their experiences
Not friendly fire: News director at odds with CBS over story
Overdraft on credibility?: Reporter faces conflict-of-interest charges
Written rules can be hazardous: A lawyer views ethics codes
Project censored, sins of omission and the hardest “W” of all – “why”
Risking the newsroom’s image: How editors, in a good cause, can strain independence

Ethics Case Studies resources and social media channels

Journalism and Media Ethics Cases
Markkula Center for Applied Ethics
Focus Areas
Journalism and Media Ethics
Journalism and Media Ethics Resources

For permission to reprint articles, submit requests to [email protected] .

How might news platforms and products ensure that ethical journalism on chronic issues is not drowned out by the noise of runaway political news cycles?

How can media institutions facilitate the free flow of information and promote truth during an election cycle shrouded in misinformation?

A reporter faces a choice between protecting a source or holding a source accountable for their public actions.

Should a source’s name be redacted retroactively from a student newspaper’s digital archive?

Should a student editor decline to publish an opinion piece that is culturally insensitive?

A tweet goes viral, but its news value is questionable.

What should student editors do if an opinion piece is based on factual inaccuracies?

Do student journalists’ friendships constitute a conflict of interest?

Is granting sexual assault survivors anonymity an act of journalistic compassion, or does it risk discrediting them?

Should student journalists grant anonymity to protect undocumented students?

HIGHLY COMMENDED FOR BEST OVERALL DIGITAL MEDIA AT THE 2022 SPA AWARDS.

Beginner’s Guide to Case Studies In Journalism

Image shows a desk with a hand writing on papers. [Finding case studies journalism]

Lily Gilbey

Learning how to find case studies and implement them into your research is fundamental to creating powerful journalism.

Case studies, relaying important and interesting experiences, can bring a story to life. Including case studies in your work can also give a platform to those who deserve a safe space to tell their story.

Case Studies In Journalism

Case studies can provide human perspective and experience, which, in turn, can make stories more engaging and relatable. This human connection allows the audience to have a deeper attachment and understanding of the subject matter .

A case study can accompany a feature, personalise a news story or even be published by itself.

Personal accounts of serious matters can influence an audience’s emotional connection to the case study and spark action from readers, for example, by encouraging them to sign a petition or inspire meaningful conversations.

Case studies also allow us to diversify perspectives by enabling journalists to represent different experiences of cultures and communities, which can help shape a well-rounded and comprehensive story. This can also give a platform to those who are often underrepresented in the media and amplify marginalised voices.

Finding Case Studies

To find your case study, you must specify the topic of the story you are trying to produce. Doing this allows you to narrow down your search and relevant people with stories and experiences that align with the theme of the story.

Social media can be a valuable tool for this. Platforms like X, Facebook and LinkedIn can be useful for finding sources and reaching out to them, as long as their privacy settings allow it. Twitter Advanced Search allows you to filter tweets by location, keywords, and dates.

Resources like X’s #JournoRequest hashtag can make finding your source as simple as sending out a tweet. Individuals typically tweet a specific call for sources with certain experiences or expertise. A #JournoRequest can include your deadline, the publication and how to contact you. It also lets accounts like PR & Journo Requests and Press Plugs know you’re looking for sources. You can also ask for retweets explicitly if you’re looking for sources outside of your general algorithm.

O nline forums and communities are another great way to source case studies. A quick search of your topic on Reddit could lead you to hundreds of people with relevant and interesting stories. Reaching out to local charities and campaigns can also be a good way of finding case studies.

Lily Canter, journalist and lecturer at Sheffield University, emphasises the use of PR agencies and Press Offices in finding case studies, as they already have an established database of people who can be contacted. The Journalist Enquiry Service is also free to use, and allows you send a request to hundreds of relevant experts, charities and PRs.

Ethical Considerations Of Using Case Studies

As with all aspects of journalism, ethics are fundamental to sourcing and hearing from a case study, and o btaining informed consent is extremely important. Additionally, it is your responsibility to be fully transparent about the purpose of the story and the potential consequences it might have when it is published.

It is equally crucial to approach personal topics with sensitivity, bearing in mind that they may have the potential to trigger case studies or audiences. It is therefore important not to approach people in an intrusive way which may cause unnecessary harm.

The topic of privacy should be always discussed prior to publishing a case study, especially when dealing with sensitive stories. When necessary, you can use pseudonyms to anonymise sources.

When presenting case studies, it’s of the utmost important to remain truthful and avoid distorting the narrative, which could cause harm to your sources.

THE ART OF WRITING A STELLAR OPINION PIECE

Navigating sensitive reporting: a journalist’s guide, disability-inclusive language in journalism.

Featured image courtesy of Vlada Karpovich via Pexels . No changes or alterations have been made to this image. Image license found here .

Hi, I'm Lily, and i'm currently studying my Masters Degree in Visual Journalism. My passion for motorsport encouraged me to pursue my journalism career further through my writing.

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Case Studies

More than 70 cases pair ethics concepts with real world situations. From journalism, performing arts, and scientific research to sports, law, and business, these case studies explore current and historic ethical dilemmas, their motivating biases, and their consequences. Each case includes discussion questions, related videos, and a bibliography.

A Million Little Pieces

James Frey’s popular memoir stirred controversy and media attention after it was revealed to contain numerous exaggerations and fabrications.

Abramoff: Lobbying Congress

Super-lobbyist Abramoff was caught in a scheme to lobby against his own clients. Was a corrupt individual or a corrupt system – or both – to blame?

Apple Suppliers & Labor Practices

Is tech company Apple, Inc. ethically obligated to oversee the questionable working conditions of other companies further down their supply chain?

Approaching the Presidency: Roosevelt & Taft

Some presidents view their responsibilities in strictly legal terms, others according to duty. Roosevelt and Taft took two extreme approaches.

Appropriating “Hope”

Fairey’s portrait of Barack Obama raised debate over the extent to which an artist can use and modify another’s artistic work, yet still call it one’s own.

Arctic Offshore Drilling

Competing groups frame the debate over oil drilling off Alaska’s coast in varying ways depending on their environmental and economic interests.

Banning Burkas: Freedom or Discrimination?

The French law banning women from wearing burkas in public sparked debate about discrimination and freedom of religion.

Birthing Vaccine Skepticism

Wakefield published an article riddled with inaccuracies and conflicts of interest that created significant vaccine hesitancy regarding the MMR vaccine.

Blurred Lines of Copyright

Marvin Gaye’s Estate won a lawsuit against Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams for the hit song “Blurred Lines,” which had a similar feel to one of his songs.

Bullfighting: Art or Not?

Bullfighting has been a prominent cultural and artistic event for centuries, but in recent decades it has faced increasing criticism for animal rights’ abuse.

Buying Green: Consumer Behavior

Do purchasing green products, such as organic foods and electric cars, give consumers the moral license to indulge in unethical behavior?

Cadavers in Car Safety Research

Engineers at Heidelberg University insist that the use of human cadavers in car safety research is ethical because their research can save lives.

Cardinals’ Computer Hacking

St. Louis Cardinals scouting director Chris Correa hacked into the Houston Astros’ webmail system, leading to legal repercussions and a lifetime ban from MLB.

Cheating: Atlanta’s School Scandal

Teachers and administrators at Parks Middle School adjust struggling students’ test scores in an effort to save their school from closure.

Cheating: Sign-Stealing in MLB

The Houston Astros’ sign-stealing scheme rocked the baseball world, leading to a game-changing MLB investigation and fallout.

Cheating: UNC’s Academic Fraud

UNC’s academic fraud scandal uncovered an 18-year scheme of unchecked coursework and fraudulent classes that enabled student-athletes to play sports.

Cheney v. U.S. District Court

A controversial case focuses on Justice Scalia’s personal friendship with Vice President Cheney and the possible conflict of interest it poses to the case.

Christina Fallin: “Appropriate Culturation?”

After Fallin posted a picture of herself wearing a Plain’s headdress on social media, uproar emerged over cultural appropriation and Fallin’s intentions.

Climate Change & the Paris Deal

While climate change poses many abstract problems, the actions (or inactions) of today’s populations will have tangible effects on future generations.

Cover-Up on Campus

While the Baylor University football team was winning on the field, university officials failed to take action when allegations of sexual assault by student athletes emerged.

Covering Female Athletes

Sports Illustrated stirs controversy when their cover photo of an Olympic skier seems to focus more on her physical appearance than her athletic abilities.

Covering Yourself? Journalists and the Bowl Championship

Can news outlets covering the Bowl Championship Series fairly report sports news if their own polls were used to create the news?

Cyber Harassment

After a student defames a middle school teacher on social media, the teacher confronts the student in class and posts a video of the confrontation online.

Defending Freedom of Tweets?

Running back Rashard Mendenhall receives backlash from fans after criticizing the celebration of the assassination of Osama Bin Laden in a tweet.

Dennis Kozlowski: Living Large

Dennis Kozlowski was an effective leader for Tyco in his first few years as CEO, but eventually faced criminal charges over his use of company assets.

Digital Downloads

File-sharing program Napster sparked debate over the legal and ethical dimensions of downloading unauthorized copies of copyrighted music.

Dr. V’s Magical Putter

Journalist Caleb Hannan outed Dr. V as a trans woman, sparking debate over the ethics of Hannan’s reporting, as well its role in Dr. V’s suicide.

East Germany’s Doping Machine

From 1968 to the late 1980s, East Germany (GDR) doped some 9,000 athletes to gain success in international athletic competitions despite being aware of the unfortunate side effects.

Ebola & American Intervention

Did the dispatch of U.S. military units to Liberia to aid in humanitarian relief during the Ebola epidemic help or hinder the process?

Edward Snowden: Traitor or Hero?

Was Edward Snowden’s release of confidential government documents ethically justifiable?

Ethical Pitfalls in Action

Why do good people do bad things? Behavioral ethics is the science of moral decision-making, which explores why and how people make the ethical (and unethical) decisions that they do.

Ethical Use of Home DNA Testing

The rising popularity of at-home DNA testing kits raises questions about privacy and consumer rights.

Flying the Confederate Flag

A heated debate ensues over whether or not the Confederate flag should be removed from the South Carolina State House grounds.

Freedom of Speech on Campus

In the wake of racially motivated offenses, student protests sparked debate over the roles of free speech, deliberation, and tolerance on campus.

Freedom vs. Duty in Clinical Social Work

What should social workers do when their personal values come in conflict with the clients they are meant to serve?

Full Disclosure: Manipulating Donors

When an intern witnesses a donor making a large gift to a non-profit organization under misleading circumstances, she struggles with what to do.

Gaming the System: The VA Scandal

The Veterans Administration’s incentives were meant to spur more efficient and productive healthcare, but not all administrators complied as intended.

German Police Battalion 101

During the Holocaust, ordinary Germans became willing killers even though they could have opted out from murdering their Jewish neighbors.

Head Injuries & American Football

Many studies have linked traumatic brain injuries and related conditions to American football, creating controversy around the safety of the sport.

Head Injuries & the NFL

American football is a rough and dangerous game and its impact on the players’ brain health has sparked a hotly contested debate.

Healthcare Obligations: Personal vs. Institutional

A medical doctor must make a difficult decision when informing patients of the effectiveness of flu shots while upholding institutional recommendations.

High Stakes Testing

In the wake of the No Child Left Behind Act, parents, teachers, and school administrators take different positions on how to assess student achievement.

In-FUR-mercials: Advertising & Adoption

When the Lied Animal Shelter faces a spike in animal intake, an advertising agency uses its moral imagination to increase pet adoptions.

Krogh & the Watergate Scandal

Egil Krogh was a young lawyer working for the Nixon Administration whose ethics faded from view when asked to play a part in the Watergate break-in.

Limbaugh on Drug Addiction

Radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh argued that drug abuse was a choice, not a disease. He later became addicted to painkillers.

U.S. Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte’s “over-exaggeration” of an incident at the 2016 Rio Olympics led to very real consequences.

Meet Me at Starbucks

Two black men were arrested after an employee called the police on them, prompting Starbucks to implement “racial-bias” training across all its stores.

Myanmar Amber

Buying amber could potentially fund an ethnic civil war, but refraining allows collectors to acquire important specimens that could be used for research.

Negotiating Bankruptcy

Bankruptcy lawyer Gellene successfully represented a mining company during a major reorganization, but failed to disclose potential conflicts of interest.

Pao & Gender Bias

Ellen Pao stirred debate in the venture capital and tech industries when she filed a lawsuit against her employer on grounds of gender discrimination.

Pardoning Nixon

One month after Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency, Gerald Ford made the controversial decision to issue Nixon a full pardon.

Patient Autonomy & Informed Consent

Nursing staff and family members struggle with informed consent when taking care of a patient who has been deemed legally incompetent.

Prenatal Diagnosis & Parental Choice

Debate has emerged over the ethics of prenatal diagnosis and reproductive freedom in instances where testing has revealed genetic abnormalities.

Reporting on Robin Williams

After Robin Williams took his own life, news media covered the story in great detail, leading many to argue that such reporting violated the family’s privacy.

Responding to Child Migration

An influx of children migrants posed logistical and ethical dilemmas for U.S. authorities while intensifying ongoing debate about immigration.

Retracting Research: The Case of Chandok v. Klessig

A researcher makes the difficult decision to retract a published, peer-reviewed article after the original research results cannot be reproduced.

Sacking Social Media in College Sports

In the wake of questionable social media use by college athletes, the head coach at University of South Carolina bans his players from using Twitter.

Selling Enron

Following the deregulation of electricity markets in California, private energy company Enron profited greatly, but at a dire cost.

Snyder v. Phelps

Freedom of speech was put on trial in a case involving the Westboro Baptist Church and their protesting at the funeral of U.S. Marine Matthew Snyder.

Something Fishy at the Paralympics

Rampant cheating has plagued the Paralympics over the years, compromising the credibility and sportsmanship of Paralympian athletes.

Sports Blogs: The Wild West of Sports Journalism?

Deadspin pays an anonymous source for information related to NFL star Brett Favre, sparking debate over the ethics of “checkbook journalism.”

Stangl & the Holocaust

Franz Stangl was the most effective Nazi administrator in Poland, killing nearly one million Jews at Treblinka, but he claimed he was simply following orders.

Teaching Blackface: A Lesson on Stereotypes

A teacher was put on leave for showing a blackface video during a lesson on racial segregation, sparking discussion over how to teach about stereotypes.

The Astros’ Sign-Stealing Scandal

The Houston Astros rode a wave of success, culminating in a World Series win, but it all came crashing down when their sign-stealing scheme was revealed.

The Central Park Five

Despite the indisputable and overwhelming evidence of the innocence of the Central Park Five, some involved in the case refuse to believe it.

The CIA Leak

Legal and political fallout follows from the leak of classified information that led to the identification of CIA agent Valerie Plame.

The Collapse of Barings Bank

When faced with growing losses, investment banker Nick Leeson took big risks in an attempt to get out from under the losses. He lost.

The Costco Model

How can companies promote positive treatment of employees and benefit from leading with the best practices? Costco offers a model.

The FBI & Apple Security vs. Privacy

How can tech companies and government organizations strike a balance between maintaining national security and protecting user privacy?

The Miss Saigon Controversy

When a white actor was cast for the half-French, half-Vietnamese character in the Broadway production of Miss Saigon , debate ensued.

The Sandusky Scandal

Following the conviction of assistant coach Jerry Sandusky for sexual abuse, debate continues on how much university officials and head coach Joe Paterno knew of the crimes.

The Varsity Blues Scandal

A college admissions prep advisor told wealthy parents that while there were front doors into universities and back doors, he had created a side door that was worth exploring.

Providing radiation therapy to cancer patients, Therac-25 had malfunctions that resulted in 6 deaths. Who is accountable when technology causes harm?

Welfare Reform

The Welfare Reform Act changed how welfare operated, intensifying debate over the government’s role in supporting the poor through direct aid.

Wells Fargo and Moral Emotions

In a settlement with regulators, Wells Fargo Bank admitted that it had created as many as two million accounts for customers without their permission.

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Digital Platforms and Journalistic Careers: A Case Study of Substack Newsletters

Executive summary.

In 2018, the technology reporter Taylor Lorenz predicted journalists would adopt influencer tactics to grow their own audiences and directly distribute content to their followers. Since then, journalists have continued to experiment with using digital platforms as part of their career activities. These digital tools provide journalists with the opportunity to capitalize on and monetize their personal brands and skills. In 2020, Lorenz followed up her prediction, anticipating that we will now begin to see “the dark side of this movement.” While independence provides journalists with new career opportunities, it also presents challenges as they risk burnout, precarity, audience pressures, and backlash for their independent work.

The media is often studied as either institutional news work or social media activity. However, on digital platforms journalists increasingly blur the lines between personal and professional, institutional and independent, and reporting and commentary. Opportunities to monetize online content, connect with new audiences, and pursue creative and multimedia projects expand the ways in which journalists can piece together their careers.

Thus, questions arise about how journalists structure and conceptualize their work when working on digital platforms. Why and how do journalists use these tools? What do journalists see as the tools’ strengths and weaknesses, and how do they fit into the broader media ecosystem? In what ways do they complement or contradict journalistic norms and standards?

This report draws on a case study of journalists who use the digital newsletter platform Substack to understand how such platforms affect their work, careers, and identities. Through a combination of computational and qualitative methods, I seek to understand who uses Substack, why journalists use the platform, how they use it, and how Substack relates to the broader media ecosystem.

I identify three dominant themes that explain how journalists use and interpret Substack. Each theme carries implications for how journalists structure their careers, produce media content, and conceptualize their identity.

Journalists who view newsletters as a career resource use Substack to enhance their work within the traditional legacy media industry. They use their newsletters to create a persona as an expert on a niche topic, publicize their work, practice professional skills, and build a loyal audience in hopes of achieving career advancements. Most in this group tend to offer their newsletters for free; however, some who view themselves as experts in the topics on which they write charge a subscription fee. They seek to continue to uphold journalistic norms of objectivity, fairness, and balance even when embracing the freedom of work on digital platforms. In this way, these writers rely on ties with institutional media outlets to which they seek to link their careers. Strong ties to the media industry and value of journalistic norms strengthen their identification as journalists as a core aspect of their sense of self.
Alternatively, some pursue newsletters as an alternative media model . These journalists critique dominant media outlets, highlighting experiences of precarity, inefficiencies, and the ways in which norms of objectivity exclude personalized forms of information production and audience engagement. Within their newsletters, these writers strive to produce alternative stories that they feel dominant media institutions do not support or incentivize. Paid subscription models offer a new funding stream that grants writers independence to capitalize on their positionality and personal experiences as a legitimate source of content production. Thus, these journalists express broadened conceptions of their professional identity defined by innate qualities and skills as they seek to build careers unconstrained by institutional norms and barriers.
Finally, a third subset of journalists define their newsletters as a lifeboat . For these journalists, newsletters serve as stopgaps when they lack other career opportunities and resources. These journalists are critical of the economic feasibility, informational quality, and role of technology companies in newsletter media models. In this way, they remain skeptical of Substack and do not plan to use the platform for a prolonged period. Feelings of hopelessness with the media industry led these writers to distance themselves from their professional identity as journalists.

These three themes illustrate how digital tools expand the ways in which journalists pursue careers and conceptualize their work. By highlighting the multiple ways in which a digital platform affects the careers and structure of journalism, the report emphasizes the ambiguous implications of technological change, rather than representing it as predetermining changes or affecting those who use digital tools all in the same way. 1 Lee, Kevin Woojin, and Elizabeth Anne Watkins, “From Performativity to Performances: Reconsidering Platforms’ Production of the Future of Work, Organizing, and Society.” Sociologica 14(3), 205-15. https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/11673 The report concludes with a discussion of the implications of the diverse uses of digital platforms for journalists on the trustworthiness and consistency of information in the public sphere.

Introduction

Ben started writing about hip-hop as a freelance journalist in 2014. He gradually built up connections with major outlets, producing articles picked up by business and culture magazines. However, Ben felt dissatisfied by the transactional nature of his work. “It didn’t really feel like I was making a true impact beyond getting an occasional check,” he explains. Ben wanted to make more of an impact with his writing. He wanted to build a relationship with his readers, rather than “writing for the editors” to make a living.

In 2017, Ben started an email newsletter focused on the artists, producers, and fans innovating the business of hip-hop. The newsletter allowed him to build an ongoing and direct relationship with his readers and capitalize on his expertise in his niche topic.

He describes his motivation to start the newsletter:

It was the opportunity to take advantage of the changing landscape in digital media, but also have an opportunity to elevate and have a proper home for the type of things that I was writing.… I saw what a few other early writers were doing in this space, where they were taking advantage of the tools and the platforms to create a home for their writing, and in many ways, being able to build a sustainable career and enterprise off that. It was taking advantage of the niche economics that I think are possible with the internet today, where because of how cheap it can be to get something started, you don’t necessarily need to have a vast user base. You can have a publication that appeals to a pretty small base, but a passionate base of readers, and then just build a business model around that.

Ben’s newsletter has grown into his full-time occupation, with more than ten thousand paying subscribers. He expresses pride in the entrepreneurialism of his pursuits and hopes to see “more independent media own their particular niches,” through which writers can “succeed to do what they want to do full-time.”

Ben’s story exemplifies how digital technologies are creating opportunities for journalists and information producers to structure their careers to produce and distribute content in new ways. Traditionally, dominant professional institutions—most notably legacy media publications and more recently digital news outlets—structured journalistic norms and dictated career success. These institutions served as gatekeepers that enabled insular professional groups to maintain control over the production and distribution of legitimate knowledge and information. 2 Karin Wahl-Jorgensen and Thomas Hanitzsch, eds., The Handbook of Journalism Studies, International Communication Association (ICA) Handbook Series (New York: Routledge, 2009). They promoted techniques, such as the norms of reporting, sourcing, and fact-checking, as methods of producing “objective” information. 3 Michael Schudson, Discovering the News (New York: Basic Books, 1981). Additionally, through the creation of explicitly professional spaces and publications, they intended to separate journalists’ professional roles as revealers or communicators of external facts from their private roles as subjective individuals with their own worldviews and values.

In contemporary media work, digital technologies and online platforms allow journalists to use a variety of tools to produce and distribute content. Digital tools offer journalists new opportunities and constraints. Online platforms challenge the clear boundaries between professional and personal forms of content production. 4 Erin Reid and Lakshmi Ramarajan, “Seeking Purity, Avoiding Pollution: Strategies for Moral Career Building,” Organization Science, November 24, 2021, orsc.2021.1514, https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2021.1514. Furthermore, digital platforms, direct distribution channels, and diverse forms of information communication—podcasts, liveblogs, newsletters, etc.—blur the line between professional journalism and the increase of other types of digital creatives and content producers. 5 Emily Bell and Taylor Owen, “The Platform Press: How Silicon Valley reengineered journalism” (Columbia Journalism Review, 2017). Digital tools thus require journalists to combine networks and strategies from professional journalism with entrepreneurship, microcelebrity, influencer culture, research, and academia. Additionally, digitization creates new incentives for news work and ways of defining success, including a focus on audience engagement, circulation metrics, and digital attention. 6 Angele Christin, Metrics at Work (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2020); Caitlin Petre, “The Traffic Factories: Metrics at Chartbeat, Gawker Media, and The New York Times,” Tow Center for Digital Journalism. A Tow/Knight Report (Columbia School of Journalism, 2015); Rebecca Jablonsky, Tero Karppi, and Nick Seaver, “Introduction: Shifting Attention,” Science, Technology, & Human Values, November 22, 2021, 016224392110588, https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439211058823. Last, as journalists engage in independent forms of online content production, technology companies serve an increasingly central role in structuring how journalists produce—and audiences access—news and information. 7 Matt Carlson, “Automating Judgment? Algorithmic Judgment, News Knowledge, and Journalistic Professionalism,” New Media, 2017, 18. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1461444817706684

Simultaneously, journalists face challenges in legacy media work due to increasing employment precarity and distrust of mainstream institutions. Dominant media outlets increasingly favor part-time, contingent, or contract-based work. 8 Chadha, Kalyani, and Linda Steiner, eds. Newswork and Precarity. London; New York: Routledge, 2022.; Cohen, Nicole S. “Entrepreneurial Journalism and the Precarious State of Media Work.” South Atlantic Quarterly 114, no. 3 (July 2015): 513–33.; Vallas, Steven P., and Angèle Christin. “Work and Identity in an Era of Precarious Employment: How Workers Respond to ‘Personal Branding’ Discourse.” Work and Occupations 45, no. 1 (February 2018): 3–37. https://doi.org/10.1177/0730888417735662 In 2021, the Pew Research Center reported that newsroom employment has fallen 26 percent since 2008. 9 Mason Walker, “U.S. newsroom employment has fallen 26% since 2008,” Pew Research Center , July 23, 2021/. Employment precarity incentivizes or necessitates journalists to seek alternative career opportunities, such as using digital platforms. Additionally, Americans remain skeptical about journalists’ and media companies’ ability to communicate quality information. The percentage of Americans who say they have a great deal or a fair amount of trust in the mass mainstream media fell from 53 percent to 40 percent between 2002 and 2020, according to a Gallup poll. 10 Megan Brenan, “Americans Remain Distrustful of Mass Media,” Gallup.com, September 30, 2020. That distrust contributes to news consumers seeking alternative sources of content outside of standard outlets and publications.

This report focuses on journalists who write independent email newsletters on Substack within the context of the changing status and role of legacy and digital news work. I draw on fifty-two interviews with journalists who write email newsletters to offer a content analysis of their professional backgrounds and newsletter texts. I focus on how the prevalence of platform technologies and the changing role of media institutions affect the ways in which journalists navigate career opportunities, conceptualize their goals, produce content for their audiences, and define their professional identities. This includes understanding journalists’ motivation for working on digital platforms: how they distinguish career transition points and define success, produce content, perceive their audience and networks, and incorporate digital tools into their careers.

The report proceeds in three additional sections. In section one, I describe the Substack case study and outline my research methodology. Section two presents the findings of the report in two subsections. First, I use computational data to explore newsletter writers on the platform and the network structure of newsletter content. I then use my core findings to draw on qualitative data to discuss three dominant themes that emerged from my interviews and explain how interviewees use and understand Substack: using newsletters as a (i) career resource, (ii) alternative media model, or (iii) lifeboat. Each of these themes relates to distinct goals, strategies for content production, and conceptions of professional identity. Finally, the report concludes with a discussion about how the varied ways in which journalists approach and interpret newsletter production relate to phenomena such as the crises of expertise, informational distrust, and post-truth politics.

Case Study and Method

This report focuses on journalists who use or have used the newsletter platform Substack. Focusing on a single platform allows comparisons of how journalists use the same digital tool.

Substack started in 2017 as an alternative media space in reaction to critiques of institutional and social media production. The company provides the infrastructure to write and distribute digital newsletters, giving creators control over their email subscription lists, archives, and intellectual property. Substack also focuses on writing as the main output versus requiring other technical or digital skills. The company targets journalists, writers, experts, and visual-content creators geared toward discursive output, although it has been expanding its focus and functionality. Journalists who use Substack largely do so for the purpose of sharing and producing textual information.

Substack was created by media insiders with the goal of using technology and entrepreneurship to help independent writers make a living by providing a direct distribution and subscription product. In doing so, Substack seeks to present an alternative to ad-supported media. The company contrasts its platform with those of advertisement-based media models that offer incentives toward shallow “clickbait” and “fake news.” Instead, Substack frames itself as a resource for free speech, “democratizing” discourse and producing “personal” and “trustworthy” content. Substack describes itself as a “platform” that “enables” content without dictating it, in contrast to a “publisher” that maintains content moderation discretion. However, the company has attracted controversy due to questions about content moderation and responsibility and accountability for discourse that is produced and distributed using the platform. 11 Pompeo, Joe. “‘There Has to Be a Line’: Substack’s Founders Dive Headfirst Into the Culture Wars.” Vanity Fair, May 23, 2022; Navlakha, Meera. “Why Substack Creators Are Leaving the Platform, Again.” Mashable, March 9, 2022; Schulz, Jacob. “Substack’s Curious Views on Content Moderation.” Lawfare, January 4, 2021. In response to criticism over free speech and writer precarity, the company has added new features for its users, such as access to legal advice, writer office hours, and community-building resources.

As of 2021, Substack reported millions of users and more than a million paying subscribers. 12 Tiffany Hsu, “Substack’s Growth Spurt Brings Growing Pains,” The New York Times, April 13, 2022. Its top ten writers reportedly earn more than $7 million in annual revenue. The company is a venture-backed startup. Additionally, the company typically takes 10 percent of paid subscription fees, which range from approximately $5 to $50 per month but are not required. The most popular writers on Substack can make six-figure salaries and more yearly income than in standard media jobs; however, some writers often do not consider newsletter writing as a form of full-time work and thus may balance it with other professional commitments. 13 Chang, Clio. “The Substackerati.” Columbia Journalism Review, Winter 2020. Given its semiprofessional nature, Substack provides an ideal case study to understand how new career resources offered on digital platforms affect the goals, strategies, and identities of journalists.

The report includes computational and qualitative data to assess journalists on Substack. Computational data include large-scale queries of information drawn directly from the platform, such as writer topics, professional backgrounds, and network patterns. These data provide an overview of who uses the platform and the subjects they cover to help inform the subsequent thematic analysis.

The report’s core findings are based on qualitative data from interviews with fifty-two journalists who write digital newsletters; analysis of their newsletter content, particularly About pages and initial posts that describe their newsletter’s content, purpose, and structure; and online information on their professional background, such as their LinkedIn page, Muck Rack profile, or personal website. Interview subjects were recruited from multiple points of contact to reflect a range of journalists using the platform. (See appendix A for descriptive statistics.) 14 The sample includes six writers who used Substack but switched to producing a digital newsletter on another platform. There was no discernible difference between the justifications for and use of Substack in this subset of interviewees and the larger sample.

Initial respondents were identified using searches on Google and Substack. Additional respondents were recruited using snowball sampling. Respondents were identified as journalists based on how they self-describe in their newsletter profile, or by using information about their broader professional background available online. The sample captures journalists with a variety of careers that include both independent and institutional forms of work. 15 Media ecosystems have also been shown to have a relationship to partisan identity (see Benkler, Faris, and Roberts 2018; Hemmer 2016; Lemieux and Schmalzbauer 2000; Nadler, Bauer, and Konieczna 2020). The study includes participants with a range of political viewpoints, but did not create a representative sample based on partisanship.

Professionals most strongly associated with institutions are employed by a news media company and receive a sustainable salary from their place of employment. In contrast, independent workers take on freelance work with no primary employer and/or self-describe as “independent.” Interview questions were focused on the subject’s professional life, including how they go about their work, balance professional opportunities, and describe their goals and objectives. The research uses qualitative data to illuminate the ways in which digital platforms affect the practices and understandings of journalists, but does not provide a representative or generalizable sample. Textual data, including the About pages of each newsletter and the LinkedIn, Muck Rack, or personal website of interview respondents, supplement interview data to understand respondents’ backgrounds and trajectories. Conclusions are based on how interviewees describe the goals, content, and motivations for their newsletter connected to the structure of their careers and professional identities.

The findings proceed in two subsections. First, the report draws on computational data to generate a layout of the Substack platform. The computational data provide a map of what topics newsletter writers focus on, what types of writers use the tool, and how their newsletters fit within the broader media landscape. The report then draws on qualitative interview and content analysis data focused specifically on how and why these journalists use Substack.

A Computational Layout: Writers on Substack

Using computational methods, a co-researcher, Nick Hagar, and I explore the types of writers and content available on Substack. 16 I would like to thank Nick Hagar for his assistance with computational models and analysis. Substack maintains a discovery feature that sorts newsletters by category. When this research was collected in 2021, it maintained nineteen topical categories and has since added six more. Using the search feature, we approximated the landscape of the most active newsletters on the platform and their categorical labels. 17 The newsletters that are not captured by category search appear far less active: a median of 7 total newsletter posts for general search results, compared with 42 for category search results. Newsletters sorted by category posted a median of 3 days ago, whereas in the general search sample newsletters posted a median of 58 days ago. Thus, Substack’s taxonomy offers a good representation of active newsletters on the platform. Augmenting this approach with other search functions returns small and abandoned newsletters.

Table 1 provides an overview of how many active newsletters appear within each category through the Substack search function. At the time of our research our analysis identified 2,686 unique active newsletters, a breakdown of which is presented in Table 1.

Table 1: Active newsletters by category. Percentages are rounded to one-tenth of a percent.

Unsurprisingly, most Substack newsletters focus on broad and standard categories of media production, such as culture and politics. After 2021, the introduction of new categories of music, comics, crypto, parenting, fiction, and podcasts shows that niche sections of the platform are growing. Additionally, the prevalence of technology as the most active category points to the types of stories and topics most accessible as an independent media source. Writing about technology needs only a computer and internet connection, meaning it requires fewer resources than field reporting. Later in the report, journalists discuss their ability to establish their expertise writing about digital media, making it a lucrative category for newsletter production.

We manually classified the 2,686 active newsletters to understand the professional background of the authors on the platform. Information on authors’ professional background was gleaned from writer biographies, as well as general information available on the Web.

Table 2 represents the background classifications based on the nine most common professional backgrounds found on Substack.

Table 2: Substack user professional backgrounds. Percentages are rounded to nearest one-tenth of a percent.

Once again unsurprisingly, writers and discursive content creators made up most newsletter producers, as well as professionals who use newsletters to capitalize on and share specific expertise. The data suggest that journalists account for about 20 percent of content producers on Substack.

Last, we looked at the relationship between newsletters and other forms of media by comparing hyperlinking citation patterns. We include newsletters that published more than one public post between 2020 and 2021, published posts at a cadence of at least one every thirty days, and published at least one post that included a hyperlink to another webpage (all newsletters in our sample met these criteria). We were only able to access free posts, so our sample does not include paywalled content. This produced a sample of approximately 1.1 million hyperlinks across 139,353 posts from 2,553 active newsletters.

The results show that writers most commonly cite major media and platform domains such as Twitter, YouTube, and t he New York Times (Table 3). For example, 77 percent of newsletter writers in the sample have linked to YouTube, and 5 percent of writers have linked to t he New York Times . Furthermore, while there is large overlap in linking domains, at most, the same unique URL appears in only 2 percent of newsletters. The infrequency with which newsletters link to one another or to the same news story highlights the siloed nature of newsletter production on Substack. Rather than structurally representing an alternative media environment, writers arguably show a strong reliance on institutional news and established platforms.

Hyperlinking patterns in newsletters match the broader structure of digital attention and influence on the Web, relying on common platforms and domains that are viewed as legitimate, relevant, and likely to generate attention. 18 Lasorsa, Dominic L., Seth C. Lewis, and Avery E. Holton. “Normalizing Twitter: Journalism Practice in an Emerging Communication Space.” Journalism Studies 13, no. 1 (February 2012): 19–36, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/123293; Messner, Marcus, and Marcia Watson Distaso. “The Source Cycle: How Traditional Media and Weblogs Use Each Other as Sources.” Journalism Studies 9, no. 3 (June 2008): 447–63, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259563188_The_source_cycle_How_traditional_media_and_weblogs_use_each_other_as_sources; Noam, Eli M. Media Ownership and Concentration in America. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009; Usher, Nikki, and Yee Man Margaret Ng. “Sharing Knowledge and ‘Microbubbles’: Epistemic Communities and Insularity in US Political Journalism.” Social Media + Society 6, no. 2 (April 2020), https://doi.org/10.1177%2F2056305120926639. Thus, these results indicate that newsletters may be framed as an alternative or independent career resource, but are highly referential to and dependent on dominant media and technology platforms and publications. In this way, digital newsletters represent an element of an integrated and interdependent media environment that journalists must navigate to build their careers.

Table 3: Top 12 domain hyperlinks

Journalists’ uses and interpretations of Substack

Analysis of the qualitative data reveals three dominant themes in interviewees’ rationales for starting and maintaining Substack newsletters. Journalists I interviewed engage with and understand Substack as a (i) journalistic resource, (ii) alternative media model, or (iii) career lifeboat. Each use corresponds with different career goals, strategies of content production, and conceptions of professional identity.

Newsletters as a Journalistic Resource

Interviewees who use their digital newsletters as a career resource describe the ways in which they offer an outlet to establish a specialized portfolio, house a holistic body of work, practice the craft of writing, and secure additional career opportunities. One national political reporter describes how advice from a veteran journalist whom she admires to “build your quote-unquote personal brand and make a name for yourself” inspired her to start a newsletter. Such journalists saw newsletters as helpful in achieving career transitions.

An early-career journalist who works for a digital outlet started a newsletter in hopes of acquiring a book deal:

I wanted to write a book proposal…but I didn’t have a body of writing on [the topic].… Once it became clear that I was not going to be able to build out the bulk of that body of writing at my current job, I started looking for a new job, and I started working on this Substack, which I also hope gets me a new job at some point down the line. I think that [it is helpful] if I have something I can point to, to prove I can write about this, people are interested in it, and react to it when I write about it, and you can read it all in one place.

By housing a body of work on the specialization she desires to write about, this journalist’s newsletter serves as a resource to showcase her ability to write, report, and think critically about that topic.

Journalists in this subset thought newsletters were particularly advantageous to build a specialization and gain credibility on niche topics. While they could not always control the topics they wrote about for institutional publications, they could tailor their newsletters to their interests and hopes for their future careers.

Another early-career journalist describes how he uses his newsletter to build credibility writing about the media:

I knew that I needed to establish an authority in this field and the process of writing something every week and being in conversation with other people and reading all the time. It’s a really virtuous cycle in the sense that by doing it, I make other people aware of me and my thoughts and my credibility.

The newsletter helps him maintain a schedule and structure. He advertises the success of his newsletter by listing major institutional news outlets that have cited his work, such as Vox, Nieman Lab, and Poynter. In this way, his newsletter serves as a tool to connect him with major outlets and media figures that model his career goals, using Substack as a career resource to build expertise and connections.

This subset of journalists also sees Substack as a resource to practice and experiment with writing. Many interviewees mention writing as one of their favorite aspects of their career, but lament barriers to writing on the job.

A journalist recently employed as a breaking news reporter describes frustrations that detract from her enjoyment of the work:

As a writer, it’s hard. You want to do your thing, to be reporting and writing, but there’s all these barriers. You can’t get a job. You can’t get paid. You might be sending lots of freelance pitches, but editors are just saying “No, no, no.” It feels like you can never just get the work done. This was a great opportunity for me to start doing the creative work and thinking and hold myself to my journalistic standards and practices.

She describes her newsletter as her “passion project,” to “report it out for myself to have the learning experience, to write about it, and really think about something on a little bit of a higher level than in my day-to-day breaking news role.”

Other interviewees similarly describe their newsletters as outlets for “creativity,” a tool for “professional development,” or a “learning experience.” In this way, these journalists use their newsletters as an outlet to indulge aspects of their career that they feel are unfulfilled in other jobs. Newsletters also allow journalists to deepen skills central to their careers, such as writing, reporting, and critical thinking.

Most interviewees who use their newsletters as a professional resource offer free subscriptions. These journalists believe that keeping their newsletters free allows more readers to access their content and helps them publicize their work. As one interviewee describes: “Sneaking in my stories throughout my newsletter on Substack has been a really great way to get that into people’s inboxes and actually clicked on.” However, a few journalists who said they use the newsletter as a career resource do charge subscription fees. They view themselves as established experts on the topics that they write about, rather than using the newsletter as a resource to build expertise.

An editorial director at a business and culture magazine describes her expertise based on her extensive work experience of more than a decade in multiple newsroom roles. Her newsletter, focused on the craft of journalism, has a monthly subscription fee. She decided to paywall the content because she “was putting time and effort into it” and “thought it was worth something.”

Many journalists who consider themselves experts write on the media, news industry, and digital culture in their newsletters. In this way, the structure of journalistic work using digital tools creates opportunities for journalists to specialize and write about their experiences and knowledge of media and internet trends.

Journalists using their newsletters as a career resource balance personalization and professional norms within their content. One journalist who specializes in audience engagement and new-media innovation notes that “keeping that personal note is really important,” especially to connect with and build a loyal audience.

Another journalist, who writes about the intersection of gender and politics for a prominent American magazine, notes that the personal nature of the newsletter lessens hierarchical divides between writer and reader:

I’m much more open in the Substack than you could be in a traditional magazine article.… When you do a…review for a mainstream newspaper there is more of a status divide.

Thus, newsletters give these writers the opportunity to build more dialogic relationships with their readers and express more personalized viewpoints.

While interviewees recognize that newsletters offer a more personal outlet, they remain careful to uphold professional norms of journalistic production. They do so by differentiating their newsletters from their formal career writing, and by integrating the role of their personal experience and voice within journalistic standards.

A journalist who runs the culture and economics section of a digital outlet uses her newsletter to write articles related to, but separate from, her formal career: “The newsletter is connected to the interests of [my section], but not really something we would ever do.” She describes her newsletter as “janky” because it does not contain “original reporting…it’s mostly Googling.” The purpose of the newsletter is to write “something that’s my own, that has nothing to do with the job.” In this way, she separates the personal and playful nature of her newsletter from the standards and rigor associated with the journalistic norms important for her professional work.

Other writers uphold journalistic standards by incorporating the personal nature of the newsletter with journalistic norms. A national political reporter describes how he thinks “the objectivity of a journalist involves not coming into a story as a blank slate, but in the method that they report the story, and the fairness with which they report the story.” He says his personal identity influences how he relates to politics without compromising journalistic standards:

I grew up as a midwesterner, and so I have opinions about the unique identities of states like Michigan versus Ohio, or Indiana versus Illinois. I have preconceptions about the states, but as I’m reporting on them, I do think it’s possible to be cognizant of those preconceptions and use the method of reporting journalism to be open-minded and fair and balanced in the actual reporting about those states.

For him, the journalistic method of reporting neutralizes preconceived and personal perceptions to create “fair” and “balanced” information.

Overall, however, these interviewees express concern about how newsletter production may affect journalistic standards without the enforcement of norms and gatekeeping provided by media institutions. Two interviewees explain their worries that newsletters cannot provide the same quality of information.

The first, who writes for a prominent American magazine, claims:

[Newsletters are] great for comment. If you want to have strong opinions on established facts, then that’s something that newsletters can do very well. But who is the person doing the hardest bit of journalism, which is establishing the facts in the first place? There are no shortcuts for that, which takes a really long time and costs a lot of money.

The second journalist, who focuses on audience engagement for a national publication, agrees:

I think about all the rigorous editing and the rigorous reporting that goes into more traditional outlets that is not done on the personal level, which I don’t think is bad all the time. But I do think that when we see personal reporters with their own newsletters pursuing ambitious stories, I think a lot of times there may be issues of accuracy.

For these interviewees, journalistic norms of reporting, objectivity, and accuracy remain valuable and important standards. Newsletters prove useful as a tool for commentary, essaying, or, as one veteran reporter describes, “writing off the news”—using traditional news stories as a jumping-off point—but newsletters cannot stand in for the types of reporting core to journalistic norms and identity. Indeed, these journalists strongly identify with their professional roles. As one journalist describes: “It’s through me like a stick of rock. I don’t know what I would be if I didn’t do this job.… I would have to radically rethink my life and start all over again.” In this way, journalists use their newsletter in connection to dense networks and ties to the media industry that continue to structure journalistic careers, norms, and identity.

Newsletters as a Journalistic Alternative

Interviewees who use Substack as their main career activity consider the platform to be an innovative, entrepreneurial venture to structure alternative career paths. They critique the structures and norms of institutional media, noting the ways in which Substack provides a new media model. Notably, they point to connections with corporations and reliance on advertising that corrupt the quality of information in the media. A beauty writer critiques the connection between beauty publications and the commercial beauty industry: “Publications typically work hand in hand with brands to create content, such as product reviews and stories with favorable PR angles.” Similarly, a political reporter critiques advertising media models for incentivizing clickbait and feeding polarization:

In the news world, most journalists, media outlets, television networks, and podcasts survive on advertisement revenue. Ad revenue is driven by viewership. That means the more people see an advertisement, the more valuable it is. This incentivizes reporters, editors, radio hosts, television stations, and news outlets to make their content as viral, explosive, and sensational as possible.… It also creates conflicts of interest between publishers and the people paying them to run their advertisements.

The writer describes how he feels his newsletter offers a transformed product:

[My newsletter] is entirely subscriber supported. By asking my readers to support this newsletter instead of advertisers or investors, I am incentivized to create good content…not content that is clickbait or designed to go viral or make an advertiser happy.

By capitalizing on the subscriber model, he seeks to change the relationship between reader, writer, and journalistic content. Paid subscriptions directly connect him to his readers, making him accountable to and empowering his audience, rather than attracting investors or advertisers. In this way newsletters offer an alternative structure to produce news and information.

Journalists in the study also critiqued the hassle, inefficiency, and precarity of journalistic careers, incentivizing them to focus more on their newsletters as outlets in which they feel they have more control and freedom over their work. A veteran reporter describes how she experienced a decline in opportunities to write for major publications:

The media is shrinking…the traditional media that I’ve written for, like the Washington Post , the Wall Street Journal , all of these, they can’t afford freelancers. They don’t have space; they don’t have staff.

A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist similarly describes frustrating experiences working within institutional media:

It’s an annoying way to work, and it doesn’t pay great.… I would race to get a piece done, and then the publication would be like, “Oh, we’re actually not going to run it for the next 24 hours because this other thing happened.”… You end up playing email tag with an editor: it’s like, “Hey, did you get the piece that I sent you?” And then the news peg passes, and then you have to look for a new news peg, and then you have to rewrite the piece because time has gone by…then, like, having to rewrite it four hundred times because the news peg passed in the time that it took them to write you an email.

Starting a newsletter appealed to him because he can do “it on my own schedule.” He can directly distribute content to his readers when he feels his pieces are ready, rather than wait on the whims of a publication’s news cycle. Thus, newsletters offer an alternative that gives journalists freedom, independence, and control over their workflow.

Given the formalized nature of Substack as a career path, these journalists describe the importance of subscribers for their livelihood and as an economic model for their careers. An award-winning investigative journalist describes how his subscriber base serves as a career resource:

I can create a subscription base that will be portable, and maybe in some ways more durable, or no less durable, than actually getting a job at a big institution.

Another long-form journalist describes how he was inspired by the success of subscription podcasts to build his own newsletter:

For example, the Chapo Trap House guys who were making so much money on Patreon.… I was like, “Wow. It never occurred to me to do that.”… It was like, “So you can put something out in the world and people will pay you four, five, six bucks a month just because they like it. And you can make a lot of money that way.” I looked at that type of business model, and that’s what the Substack does.

In this way, digital platforms serve as a tool to actualize transactions between writers and readers. Subscriber models incentivize content quality by the necessity of attracting readers. Thus, from this perspective, subscriptions ensure newsletter integrity despite often lacking the traditional fact checkers or editors found in traditional media.

Last, these interviewees critique power structures in institutional news that they feel limit the range of legitimate perspectives included in news content. A music writer describes his experience at a culture magazine that led him to quit and focus on his newsletter, where he can highlight different voices, perspectives, and stories. “People around me [at the magazine] were more interested in perpetuating misogyny and bigotry and marginalization of anybody that’s not a man, essentially, or identifies as a man,” he says.

Similarly, a food writer describes her dissatisfaction with institutional food media given the exclusion of multiple perspectives and political ideas:

When I was writing for food magazines it was very much centered on a middlebrow white American gaze. You’re writing for Middle America, and don’t upset them. That was the perspective.… There is just a lack of interest in systemic problems outside of talking about racial representation or gender representation. There’s an idea of diversity as just different skin colors and genders, and not political ideas. So that’s what I’m able to actually present in my newsletter.

She now focuses almost exclusively on her newsletter, where she writes about the intersection of food, ethical consumption, economics, and sustainability, hoping to inform readers that “food decisions aren’t made in a vacuum.” She values the fact that the Substack platform allows her to “own my own time” and “create the thread of my own thought” to produce alternative content and arguments she felt institutional publications did not accept.

Newsletters can offer an alternative space to produce content outside journalistic norms. Instead of adhering to norms of objectivity, journalists in this survey describe their methods of content production as intentionally incorporating subjectivity as a different basis to produce information.

A journalist with a background in reporting on tech, markets, and fashion describes how when he worked for institutional publications, he felt tokenized as a reporter of color and forced to write about certain topics and narratives. In his newsletter, he embraces his full identity to center his point of view:

If you come from an underrepresented or overlooked or underserved community, it’s difficult to not bring all of you into a story and [keep] different parts of yourself siloed off to tell a story. That’s a bit dehumanizing. I think part of making roles and creating space for as many storytellers and journalists and reporters as possible is to really get rid of this idea that you can’t be fair or accurate if you have a point of view. I think that the idea of objectivity and leaving your identity at the door, all that does is serve patriarchal white supremacy. It serves the people who have always gotten to tell the stories.… I just try to tell stories that matter to me…I write from my point of view.

He challenges journalistic norms of objectivity by drawing on his own perspective as a legitimate alternative to inform his work.

In this way, newsletters shift journalistic identity to incorporate individual experience and traits traditionally conceptualized as separate from professional roles. Rather than describe their professional titles or learned skills as core to their identity, these journalists reference innate qualities such as “curiosity,” “empathy,” “deep thinking,” and “skepticism” as defining professional traits and identities. As one says: “Journalism for me is not a profession—it’s a personality disorder. I’m nosy. I’ve got a big mouth. I’m aggressive and pushy.” She identifies as a journalist as a personality trait and intrinsic part of her identity, rather than attaching the identity to a professional position, skill, or role. Journalistic status composes both a personal and professional identity. Journalists in the study continue to see themselves as professionals across contexts or roles, rather than within specific career positions or performing certain job skills.

Newsletter as a Journalistic Lifeboat

A third group of interviewees describes using Substack as a temporary tool when they lack other career opportunities or resources. These journalists tended to gravitate to the platform after losing employment at other media outlets. As such, Substack offers a way for them to structure their time, pursue their writing, maintain their journalistic identities, and continue in their professional field. The platform provides a free, accessible, but temporary outlet for journalists who hope to transition to other platforms or opportunities.

These interviewees tended to be the most skeptical about Substack as a media model and platform. They do not see newsletter writing as a sustainable career activity or resource. Fundamentally, these journalists critique the financial model of newsletter writing and the difficulty of amassing subscribers without a pre-established reputation, digital following, or institutional ties to legacy media.

A freelancer who decided to end his Substack newsletter describes the financial feasibility of the pursuit at length:

If you start a newsletter without a preexisting fan base, or at the very least a large and active Twitter following, building an audience…is very tricky. You basically need to churn out posts and hope a couple of them go viral on Twitter so you get a ton of more subscribers.… But the economics of this are pretty unfriendly. If you got 500 subscribers to pay you $5 a month, you’d be making $2,500 a month, or, oops, actually $2,250 after Substack takes its cut. And you’re writing at a minimum a post a week, probably more than that. If you’re doing two posts a week, say eight a month, you’re actually only making $281.25 an article. That isn’t that bad, but then you consider that the burger place down the street pays $19 an hour . You really aren’t in “livable wage” territory from a Substack alone until you have thousands of paid subscribers. And if you’re using Substack to supplement income from freelancing or a day job, it’s a lot of work.… Once you put up a paywall, you have the additional problem of a lot of your content now being hidden from public view, i.e., it can’t go viral and attract new subscribers.

He laments that subscription media models are unfeasible for most writers, as well as illogical, given the tension between paywalling content and attracting new subscribers. Furthermore, rather than newsletters serving as an outlet for alternative narratives or in-depth thoughts, he describes them as aimed toward “virality” and produced on a fast-paced timeline. Overall, by comparing Substack writing with service work, he highlights the low status and financial difficulties of the pursuit.

These writers, like many others, describe growing their subscriber base as the most challenging part of producing a newsletter. Across the three categories of journalistic work, no writers felt they had figured out the best newsletter media model. All felt uncertainty in the best way to balance growth, financial viability, and content accessibility. The difficulty in monetizing their newsletters proved particularly detrimental to writers without other income streams. Thus, journalists relying on Substack as a lifeboat expressed the most frustration because they remain in precarious professional positions.

A veteran reporter at a major urban paper lost his job when the publication went through layoffs. He started a Substack newsletter as “sort of my best option as far as employment.” However, after a few months he was disillusioned with the platform:

It’s not sustainable. It’s been very difficult, frankly, to increase subscriptions. I pretty much hit a wall about two months ago and haven’t been able to increase it. So I’m pretty down on the Substack model. I think there’s just too many things out there, too many subscriptions, and it’s too hard.

Newsletter writing becomes economically unsustainable without a substantial reader base. Indeed, interviewees described the most successful writers on the platform as those who “already had these huge Twitter followings” or “already have a brand, already have a name, and already have a reach.” In this way, these journalists see newsletter writing as supporting existing structures of power and privilege within the media, rather than providing an alternative environment.

Furthermore, these journalists argue that subscription newsletters do not incentivize quality information. Rather than newsletters serving as outlets for journalists to write about their passions, deepen their writing skills, or produce content from an alternative perspective, they feel as if newsletters do not allow for the types of meaningful content they strive to produce.

A political reporter describes how creating newsletter content became less of a priority

“Write a new newsletter” gradually slipped to the bottom of my to-do pile. I did less reporting for the newsletter and treated it more like a place to put my thoughts about the stuff I was working on and reading.… I don’t really want to write these kinds of stories anymore.… “The conversation” often seems to consist of a gaggle of pundits and Twitter addicts nodding in agreement with one another.

Furthermore, other journalists in the survey describe Substack subscription models as seeming to prioritize sensationalist and potentially viral content to attract readers and generate attention. A culture writer who now works as part of a bundled newsletter cooperative describes such incentives:

The discursive oxygen around the site has been allocated or has been sucked up by people who are using it in a way to stoke rage, or stoke anger, outrage, that sort of thing. When you create those feelings, they become powerful feelings that make people want to subscribe.

In contrast, she aims to “contextualize,” “analyze,” and “do some reporting and actually talking to people” in her work. To her, anger and outrage do not equate to meaningful content production, even if they garner more attention or subscribers.

Some interviewees also critique Substack as a platform and business that participates in the media environment given the uneasy relationship between media and technology companies. One writer describes his worries about the power that technology companies play in structuring what digital content gains visibility:

A lot of stuff with Big Tech and Facebook and Google is kind of scary these days, with a lot of alternative media locked out or at least buried in Google searches. I’m worried about Silicon Valley’s influence in the media.

Such critiques led interviewees to desire that Substack take more responsibility for the content produced and promoted on the platform. To them, it functioned like a publisher that curates and distributes content, rather than as a neutral digital tool.

Another collection of young journalists who experimented on the platform but since moved their writing to an independent site critiqued Substack’s policies:

Substack could have been a great place for experimentation that breaks away from the bigoted speech that’s dominated American newspapers during pivotal moments of social transformation (see how newspapers framed integration, interracial marriage, and gay marriage). Instead, it’s more of the same. Substack isn’t the future of media. It’s just a content management system run by a company that aims to prioritize profit over people’s lives.

From this perspective, rather than representing a hopeful or useful media model, Substack represents the perpetuation of the faults of traditional and institutional media. Thus, this subset of journalists views newsletter writing as an unsustainable pursuit and problematic media model.

A veteran international reporter sums up this view with his critique of the current media ecosystem, in which smaller publications and opportunities struggle to exist, as well as Substack’s role within it:

If you consolidate a business into big players and then that sucks up all the talent, then everything else becomes nothing more than an audition. So your book is an audition, and your big article somewhere is an audition, and your leadership of a midsized manager’s room is an audition, and your Substack is certainly an audition. The only place you’re going to get quality editing, good access, some imprimatur that matters under a living wage, is going to be, like, three places. That doesn’t feel sustainable to me. I’m suspicious of the Substack model, because it seems to be based on the idea of a lifeboat more than on the idea of an actual legitimate setting.

These journalists feel frustrated by a lack of opportunities in institutional media and hopeless about the promise of independent digital tools. Such pessimism leads them to express distance from their journalistic identity. As the international reporter continues: “My current job is to pay my mortgage and feed my kid in an industry that has done its best to die over the past decade.”

This report presents a case study of the digital newsletter platform Substack to explore how journalists use and incorporate it into their careers and how it relates to the broader media environment. Rather than falling prey to technological determinism, willful optimism, or dispiriting pessimism about the role of technology in the future of news, the report highlights some of the ways in which digital technologies can be used and understood.

In particular, I identify differences between journalists who use Substack to (i) complement their work for other publications and outlets, (ii) create an alternative media environment, and (iii) keep them connected to their professional field when they lack other opportunities and resources.

Each journalist’s use of Substack is associated with specific career goals, strategies of content production, and conceptions of journalistic identity. By focusing on the practices, intentions, and understandings of digital newsletters expressed by the journalists themselves, the report highlights how structures of news work may influence journalistic careers, as well as how journalists shape the role, use, and understanding of digital tools.

My findings point to an increase in the range of methods and logics journalists rely on to produce information as they access expanded resources to build their careers. As communication technologies continue to evolve, journalists confront ever more opportunities and tools to shape their work and careers. We see journalists experimenting not only with newsletters but with media such as podcasting and texting, and structures such as publishing work as a collective and hosting live events. Such opportunities expand the types of work journalists produce, incorporating new skills, forms of expertise, audience relationships, and methods of reporting. At the same time, these experimentations present themselves as public, facing toward an audience as journalists seek to publicize and monetize their work and brands. As journalistic careers evolve to include a wider variety of styles, tools, and methods, the opportunities also grow for audiences to access diverse content.

While these trends expand the modes of and voices able to contribute to public conversations, they also contribute to phenomena such as the crises of expertise, ontological insecurity, and post-truth politics without common norms that structure the flow, distribution, and norms of producing and accessing news and information. Readers increasingly access a high-choice media environment via newspapers, websites, tweets, podcasts, and newsletters, among others. Such a buffet of content can overwhelm and segment media consumers, limiting the amount of shared content and perspectives available to audiences. 19 Benkler, Yochai, Rob Faris, and Hal Roberts. Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018. Boczkowski, Pablo J. “Abundance.” Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Nielsen, Rasmus Kleis, and Richard Fletcher. “Democratic Creative Destruction? The Effect of a Changing Media Landscape on Democracy.” In Social Media and Democracy, edited by Nathaniel Persily and Joshua A. Tucker, 1st ed., 139–62. Cambridge University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/9781108890960.008. Prior, Markus. Post-Broadcast Democracy: How Media Choice Increases Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. While structures such as newsletters can allow journalists to capitalize on niche audiences and produce content through a greater variety of means and media, these trends also present challenges for creating shared understandings of facts and narratives—one of the traditional functions of journalism as a pillar of civil society. It raises the question of the relationship between an increase in media content and the health and robustness of the media environment. Thus, newsletters and digital platforms offer new media opportunities, as well as challenge some of the core functions of news work.

Furthermore, we see the interrelationships and dependencies between digital technologies and traditional media institutions. While digital tools are often touted as offering independence, the ways in which alternative technologies affect structures of power and privilege within the media remain limited.

Interviewees employed by traditional media institutions often sought to uphold objective norms and climb traditional career hierarchies. In contrast, interviewees more focused on digital platforms embraced the freedom to create content on their own timelines, based on their own inclinations, and incorporating their own perspectives. In this way, they articulated alternative goals of expressing themselves, garnering attention online, building community, and connecting directly with their audiences.

These styles and goals contrast with the more authoritative voice of professionalism backed up by journalistic norms and traditionally displayed in dominant media publications. However, journalists working on digital platforms must confront limits to their independence, counternormative trends, and creation of alternative media spaces. Even when working independently on digital platforms, journalists rely on dominant professional outlets and publications to publicize their work, gain visibility, and source content.

The computational portion of this report showed that newsletter writers most often link their work to existing dominant outlets. This creates webs of media production that include both institutional and independent forms of news work centered on select core publications, themes, and figures. Furthermore, within that web, digital platforms themselves become central players as their tools, algorithms, and support shape the types of content produced and made visible. Thus, the report highlights how an expanded media environment that includes an array of journalistic opportunities presents both new potentials and pitfalls for empowering journalists and supporting their careers.

In conclusion, I highlight several potential avenues for future research.

Journalistic careers: How are journalists using other digital tools? How do these opportunities exacerbate or mitigate employment precarity? How sustainable is journalistic work on digital platforms, and newsletter writing in particular? What types of opportunities and careers do journalists hope for that can be supported by new technological tools?

Political economy of news work: How do subscriber-based funding models of news work change the incentives for journalistic production? What role do technology companies play in supporting the production and distribution of journalism? How should these platforms and companies be regulated and/or held accountable for worker livelihoods and the content produced using their tools?

Audiences: What attracts readers to journalistic outlets, media, and writers? How do readers interpret journalistic writing distributed through various means? How do they relate to the readers of similar and/or different outlets and content? How do readers evaluate information from different sources and distributed on different platforms? How do these sources interact in ways that are complementary and/or contradictory in shaping audience views?

Challenges to professional norms: How are journalistic norms of objectivity, balance, and fairness being challenged by new opportunities for journalistic production? What alternative norms are journalists using as an epistemological basis for their work? How do these norms differ across platforms, publications, and individuals? How are institutional newsrooms reacting to and incorporating new norms of information production?

The media industry will continue to evolve, and journalists will continue to experiment with new tools, ideas, and career paths. While each development brings challenges, unanticipated impacts, and controversies, the journalists in our study remain committed to their work. Some even find hope within the complexity and failure of these supposed media solutions. As one reporter remarks: “It’s good a lot of people are experimenting… the industry is now being fully shaken up.”

Appendix A: Interview Demographics

Table 1: Respondent Demographic Characteristics. *Includes Latinx, East Asian, South Asian, Black, Middle Eastern, North African, and mixed-race respondents

About the Tow Center

The Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, a partner of CJR, is a research center exploring the ways in which technology is changing journalism, its practice and its consumption — as we seek new ways to judge the reliability, standards, and credibility of information online.

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The Knight Case Studies Initiative at the Journalism School collaborated with CCNMTL to create multimedia case studies, which cover a range of topics confronting modern news organizations. The case studies are used in Professor Michael Shapiro's graduate journalism course, Decision Making in the Newsroom, to prepare students for the complexity of real-life decisions they will likely face during their careers in journalism. Each case requires students to put themselves in the shoes of editors, publishers, and reporters and to grapple with a wide range of editorial, ethical, and economic issues. Components of some case studies are slowly revealed in class, thus stimulating the actual situation and the stressful decision points that unfold with it. The case study initiative aims to develop journalism students' analytic, decision-making, management, and leadership skills by adding case-based learning to traditional journalism instruction.

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Related news: Apr-07-2008: CCNMTL Launches Multimedia Journalism Case Studies

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Open Access

Peer-reviewed

Research Article

Citizen journalism reduces the credibility deficit of authoritarian government in risk communication amid COVID-19 outbreaks

Contributed equally to this work with: Greg Chih-Hsin Sheen, Hans H. Tung, Wen-Chin Wu

Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Visualization, Writing – original draft

Affiliation Department of Political Science, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan

Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Methodology, Visualization, Writing – original draft

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliations Department of Political Science, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, Center for Research in Econometric Theory and Applications, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan

Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Methodology, Visualization, Writing – original draft

Affiliation Institute of Political Science, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan

Greg Chih-Hsin Sheen,
Hans H. Tung,
Wen-Chin Wu

Published: December 8, 2021
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260961
Reader Comments

During the outbreak of an epidemic, the success in risk communications to make the public comply with disease preventive measures depends on the public’s trust in the government. In this study, we aim to understand how media audiences update their trust in the government during the COVID-19 outbreak depending on the information they received. We conducted an online survey experiment in February 2020 in Hong Kong (n = 1,016) in which respondents were randomly provided with a government press release and an endorsement either from an official or a non-official source. This study shows that the information from a non-official source enhances the credibility of official government messages. Our findings imply that dictators can actually “borrow credibility” from their citizen journalists and even nondemocratic leaders can make themselves more trustworthy to potential dissenters through citizen journalism. Allowing information flow from non-official sources can be a practical measure for governments to address the problem of a credibility deficit during a pandemic.

Citation: Sheen GC-H, Tung HH, Wu W-C (2021) Citizen journalism reduces the credibility deficit of authoritarian government in risk communication amid COVID-19 outbreaks. PLoS ONE 16(12): e0260961. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260961

Editor: Marcelo Hermes-Lima, Universidade de Brasilia, BRAZIL

Received: June 21, 2021; Accepted: November 19, 2021; Published: December 8, 2021

Copyright: © 2021 Sheen et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: The datasets collected and analyzed in the reported studies are available on the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/e89kr/ (DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/D3WHC ).

Funding: Support for this research was provided by the Ministry of Education (Taiwan, ROC, 109L900203) and the Ministry of Science and Technology (Taiwan, ROC, MOST 109-2634-F-002-045) to HHT. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

Can the trust in an authoritarian government be enhanced by endorsements from an independent source? The extant literature has documented various kinds of endorsement effects. In a democratic context, the endorsements from less biased newspapers win candidates more support from voters [ 1 ], and those made by celebrities also make them look more viable in electoral competition [ 2 ]. In a far more extreme scenario of civil wars, the outgroup leader endorsements for a peace settlement are found to work adversely on its public support [ 3 ]. Yet little is known if such an effect also exists in an authoritarian context. A related study [ 4 ] shows experimentally that the Chinese government can only rebut rumors and regain people’s trust in it when the rebuttals are endorsed by the public figures widely perceived to be independent. This study tries to enrich this literature on political endorsements under dictatorships by taking advantage of a narrow window of opportunity to conduct a survey experiment in Hong Kong (henceforth HK) during China’s COVID-19 outbreak. The timeliness of this research makes its findings less artificial since the informational environment and treatments administered in the experiments were real and vital to respondents’ lives amid the pandemic. Moreover, coupled with [ 4 ] in which the focus is more on how an authoritarian government reactively defends itself against rumors, this study further expands our understanding of the endorsements under dictatorships by analyzing how it can proactively persuade citizens of the credibility of its policies.

Specifically, our survey experiment finds that an authoritarian leader can actually “borrow credibility” from citizen journalist endorsements during a public health incident. Moreover, our findings also reveal that the effect is especially salient on those critical citizens who used to participate in HK’s 2019 Anti-Extradition Protest and favor media freedom in China. This implies that even nondemocratic leaders can make themselves more trustworthy to potential dissenters through citizen journalism.

In the current international endeavor for guarding global health against COVID-19, the role played by political systems has been placed under the spotlight. As the March 7 Lancet editorial [ 5 ] points out, China’s special “command-and-control political economy” in fighting the virus is absent in other nations, among which many are nondemocratic. And yet, their weaker authoritarian governments still will necessarily face the challenge during the global contagion. In other words, with less power and coercive apparatus than their Chinese counterpart, these governments’ ability to conduct risk communications in shaping the risk perceptions in their societies and instructing their citizens to adopt certain preventive measures such as social distancing and self-isolation becomes imperative during the current pandemic outbreak [ 6 ].

The success in risk communications to make the public comply with disease preventive measures has been found to be positively correlated with the trust in government [ 7 – 9 ]. More specifically, when it comes to the information distributed by the government, such trust often hinges on the credibility of its sources [ 10 – 12 ]. This is especially so when the information receivers, i.e. the public, do not possess adequate expertise in understanding technical details of the diseases, e.g., infection statistics and the effectiveness of vaccination [ 13 ]. However, an authoritarian government’s institutional incentive and capacity to manipulate information often make the public have little trust in its policy announcements and propaganda, even when it sincerely wants to open up and share truthful information with its citizens. For example, while some global health officials praised China’s authoritarian system for its prompt and forceful response to lock down the infected cities, the death of one of the eight arrested whistle-blowers in Wuhan, Dr. Li Wenliang, nonetheless reminded people that the outbreak could have been prevented if their voices were not censored by the local authority at the early stage when there were only a few local infections. Moreover, in addition to the problem in the internal transmission of information, an authoritarian government might also find its fragility in making its policies credible to the society it governs. The official notice of Wuhan’s lockdown on January 23 left an eight-hour window for people to decide whether they would leave or stay. According to Wuhan’s mayor, roughly 5 million Wuhan residents escaped from the city before it was actually enforced [ 14 ]. Furthermore, immediately after the lockdown, a second notice was issued to guarantee the sufficient supply of daily necessities and medical resources within the city. Nonetheless, it did not stop people from hoarding and trying their best to leave the city [ 15 ]. These incidents showed that the lack of the liberty of expression to health workers and media outlets might not only make an authoritarian government lose the opportunity to contain the virus ex ante, but also weaken its policy to stop its spread ex post.

Such a credibility deficit, therefore, presents a grave challenge to the ongoing global efforts in containing the coronavirus in countries with nondemocratic political systems. In fact, many experts have suggested that granting liberty of expression to citizens and journalists in authoritarian systems would be a solution [ 16 ]. In particular, since the public trust in the conventional media, which are usually viewed as government propaganda mouthpieces, tends to be low in authoritarian countries [ 17 ], a feasible solution to the authoritarian credibility deficit during a public health exigency should lie somewhere else: citizen journalism as an independent source.

There are three critical reasons for why citizen journalism is a good instrument for studying the endorsement effect under dictatorships. First of all, even in an authoritarian context where some kind of censorship is often imposed, citizen journalism has been found to liberate ordinary people from the government propaganda through providing alternative information [ 18 , 19 ]. Second, it is also found that, unlike professional reporters, citizen journalists are less dependent on official and organizational sources for their reports [ 20 ], and therefore enjoy a higher level of independence from the government’s information manipulation. Finally, the susceptibility of citizen journalism to the government censorship (e.g., “frictions”) in China [ 21 ] might also raise its perceived independence among citizens. The perception may well arise from the simple fact that there is no reason for the government to censor citizen journalists’ reports if they are closely aligned with the official lines or citizen journalists can be co-opted. Based on these theoretical accounts, we hypothesize that citizen journalism endorsements can reduce the credibility deficit in public health governance and facilitate risk communications in authoritarian countries.

We conducted an online survey experiment (n = 1,016) in HK between February 13 and 17, 2020. It was right after the Chinese government confirmed more than 15,000 cases on February 12 alone due to a change in the diagnostic criteria. The survey questionnaire consists of four sections: Pre-experiment questions, Experiment 1, Experiment 2, and Post-experiment questions (Please see Supplemental Information H in S1 File for our complete questionnaire.). Experiments 1 and 2 were randomly ordered. In the pre-treatment section, we asked respondents questions such as their disease prevention knowledge and behavior, views on media freedom, participation in the 2019 HK anti-extradition protests, and knowledge about Chen Qiushi (henceforth CQ), a lawyer-turned-citizen reporter from mainland China. He was known by many HK citizens for his Youtube clips sympathizing with the anti-extradition protests. Among those who have heard of him, some considered him an independent and trustworthy journalist, while others viewed him as an agent of the Communist Party for manipulating HK’s public opinion in its favor. We leveraged this variation for checking if our manipulation worked. To avoid respondent fatigue, we left questions about demographic details and other information unaffected by the treatments in the post-treatment section.

Experiment 1 was designed to test the causal effect of the citizen journalism endorsement on the government news credibility. Subjects were first provided with a real press release about Wuhan’s ample supply of life essentials issued by China’s Ministry of Commerce (henceforth MoC). Then they were randomly presented with a MoC-endorsing montage screenshot taken from an online video report made either by the People’s Daily Online (henceforth PD) or CQ right after Wuhan’s lockdown. PD’s Online video (published on January 26, 2019, on v.eople.cn) is available at http://tiny.cc/fgxkkz and the screenshots were taken at the 0:33 and the 0:43 marks of the video. There was also a brief preamble introducing them: “Right the next day (January 26) after the Ministry of Commerce issued the press release, [a reporter from China’s official media outlet, People’s Daily Online,] visited a supermarket in Wuhan to do a live stream report on the shopping activities there. Here is a picture from the visit:.” The caption in the photo reads: “A People’s Daily Online journalist is visiting a supermarket in Wuhan: There is a sufficient supply of goods; Citizens are buying things in an orderly fashion.” (the 0:33 mark). The bracketed phrase indicated the information source (i.e., an official media outlet) to the respondents in this group. Alternatively, Chen Qiushi’s video (published on January 26, 2019, on Youtube) is available at http://youtu.be/KNLlYwTnY3E and the screenshots were taken at the 0:30 and the 1:42 marks of the video. As in the PD group, the same preamble except for the information source was also shown to introduce them: “Right the next day (January 26) after the Ministry of Commerce issued the press release, [a citizen journalist, Chen Qiushi,] visited a supermarket in Wuhan to do a live stream report on the shopping activities there. Here is a picture from the visit:.” The captions in the photo read “Other places are basically empty. All people are pretty much gathering here in the section for vegetables, fruits, and meats.” (the 0:30 mark) and “Hmm, there is also tons of rice.” (the 1:42 mark). In contrast, the bracketed phrase for this group indicated a non-official information source.

While both displayed a similar image of sufficient food for sale at a local supermarket in Wuhan, they differed starkly in the source —an official media outlet versus a citizen journalist. What should be noted here is that, owing to concerns over copyrights and personality rights of those who appeared in the screenshots, the screenshots are not shown in the published version of the paper, but available upon request.

All the information presented in this experiment is genuine. Before the experiment, we verified that both screenshots echoed MoC’s press release and were comparable to each other by consulting our colleagues. During the design stage of the survey, we shared the draft of the questionnaire to our colleagues at the following institutions: Academia Sinica, London School of Economics, National Taiwan University, New York University Abu Dhabi, the University at Buffalo, and the University of Washington. Overall we consulted 9 colleagues and asked them to comment on, in particular, whether the screenshots we used for both treatment and control groups were comparable to each other. All of them agreed with us about the comparability. After showing the screenshots to respondents, we asked them to rate the credibility of MoC’s press release and that of either PD’s or CQ’s report. We hypothesized that, because PD was a government mouthpiece and CQ was a non-official source viewed by many as independent, the rating should be higher when the press release was endorsed by CQ than by PD. Experiment 2 was designed to investigate whether mentioning an expert’s government-sponsored title would make his/her opinion more or less credible. To save space, we report its empirical results in ( S2 Fig ).

Materials and methods

We conducted an online survey experiment in HK between February 13 and 17, 2020. The experiment design obtained Institutional Review Board approval at New York University Abu Dhabi (HRPP-2020–15) on February 3, 2020. With the gender and the age quotas derived from the 2018 Population and Household Statistics published by the HK government, a total of 1,016 respondents (aged 18 to 80) were recruited through the proportional quota sampling by the Rakuten Insight Global, an international survey company. What is worth noting here is that a common feature of online surveys is over-representation of highly educated respondents. Our respondents also reported higher educational levels (approximately 65% have a university or above educational level) than the general population (approximately 33%). However, this is less of an issue for our study since the main instrument of our research, citizen journalism, replies heavily on online publications [ 20 ] and its influence will certainly concentrate more on the population with a higher level of education.

Moreover, a power analysis was conducted to decide our sample size. Our goal was to obtain 0.90 power to detect an effect size of 0.3 at the 0.001 alpha error probability. This analysis yielded a sample size of 930 with 465 participants in each group, and we recruited slightly more participants than the suggested amount. Apart from the demographic questions, to minimize the possibility that inattentive responses may impair data quality, choices of all the other ones were randomized. Overall, there are 47 questions in the questionnaire. The ex ante estimated completion time is 10 minutes. The average completion time of our data is 12 minutes. Please see S1 File for further details about our participant recruitment and human subjects protection. We chose HK to conduct this experiment since it’s a part of China that still enjoyed partial media freedom, and its citizens were more experienced in detecting government propaganda. In other words, if exposing them to our informational treatment did induce an endorsement effect on a government announcement, then it should be easier to observe such an effect among other less sophisticated respondents. Moreover, since HK citizens were less likely to have a very concrete idea about Wuhan’s lockdown when our experiment was administered, they would also be more responsive to our experimental manipulations.

Vignettes and questions of Experiment 1

The government press release was presented as follows:

The Novel Coronavirus Pneumonia is spreading. At the moment of announcing the lockdown of the city of Wuhan, the Ministry of Commerce, People’s Republic of China issued a press release titled “The commerce department of Hubei is making all efforts to ensure the sufficient supplies of life essentials,” including the following statement: “On January 24, the city of Wuhan is supplied with sufficient life essentials, and the price of vegetables also decreased. The commerce department of Hubei is making all efforts to ensure the sufficient supplies of life essentials. First, the government will supply the essentials for Lunar New Year celebrations at markets. 1.55 million kilograms of eggs, 5 million kilograms of vegetables, 1 million kilograms of fish, 0.2 million kilograms of beef and 6000 heads of pigs will be distributed across 300 stations. Starting January 21, 0.5 million kilograms of frozen pork have also been distributed in cooperation with the Development Department. Second, to ensure the normal operation of retailing businesses in Wuhan, we ask all supermarkets, pharmacies, and gas stations to continue their operations during the period of Lunar New Year and increase their stocks. Third, all vegetables and meats will be shipped into Wuhan through the 24-hour Green Lane, to ensure smooth transportation. Fourth, we will continuously inspect the market supplies of life essentials and address any issues immediately.”

The Screenshots used in this experiment were then shown to respondents and the sources were:

Press release from the Ministry of Commerce of the People’s Republic of China (published on January 25, 2019) http://www.mofcom.gov.cn/article/jiguanzx/202001/20200102932965.shtml
Chen Qiushi’s video (published on January 26, 2019, on Youtube) http://youtu.be/KNLlYwTnY3E
People’s Daily Online video (published on January 26, 2019, on v.eople.cn) http://tiny.cc/fgxkkz

The survey questions included:

Do you believe in the Ministry of Commerce’s press release? Rate it on a scale from 0 to 100. A larger number indicates higher level of trust.
Do you believe that the report by Chen Qiushi faithfully reflected the situation in Wuhan? Rate it on a scale from 0 to 100. A larger number indicates higher level of trust.
Do you believe that the report by the People’s Daily Online faithfully reflected the situation in Wuhan? Rate it on a scale from 0 to 100. A larger number indicates higher level of trust.

Hypothesis and vignettes of Experiment 2

Experiment 2 was designed to investigate whether an expert opinion with or without mentioning the expert’s government-related title had a different level of credibility. We studied this using a vignette quoted from a Hong Kong newspaper. In the news piece, the expert cited, Dr. Li Xingwang, was presented as “a member of the National Medical Expert Committee and Chief Expert at Clinical and Research Center of Infectious Diseases, Beijing Ditan Hospital.” We randomly provided the respondents with the vignette that included or excluded the statement that Dr. Li was a member of National Medical Expert Committee. Then we asked respondents to rate their trust in Dr. Li’s statement. Our aim was to investigate how Dr. Li’s opinion was considered as more or less credible depending on whether or not his government-related title was cited. Being included on the government expert committee, on the one hand, reflects that his expertise is highly regarded. On the other hand, however, it also means that he may be incentivized to align more closely to the government. Hence, his opinion may not be considered as purely neutral and science-based. Accordingly, we tested the following hypothesis:

The mean perceived credibility of Dr. Li’s opinion differs between the group of respondents who read the vignette with his government-related title and the group who read the vignette without the title.

Dr. Li Xingwang, [a member of the National Medical Expert Committee and] Chief Expert at Clinical and Research Center of Infectious Diseases, Beijing Ditan Hospital, suggests that, as the virus starts to spread nationwide, there are many infected cases all over the country. Some contagious patients may display no symptoms but are later tested positive. Some others will show no obvious fever but sometimes cough, and feel fatigue. “These kinds of patients are also contagious. However, as the virus is spread by droplets, and those with mild illness tend to show fewer cough symptoms… the transmission ability might not be that strong,” said Dr. Li.

The source of news is HK01 (a Hong-Kong-based online newspaper) http://tiny.cc/0mskkz , and we asked the following question:

Do you believe in the opinion of Dr. Li Xingwang, [a member of the National Medical Expert Committee and] Chief Expert at Clinical and Research Center of Infectious Diseases, Beijing Ditan Hospital? Rate it on a scale from 0 to 100. A larger number indicates higher level of trust.

We used two-tailed t-tests to perform randomization checks. As reported in S1 and S2 Tables in S1 File , the p-values of these t-tests indicate that the group differences are insignificant in our two experiments, except for the gender in Experiment 2. We however would like to note that although randomization checks are widely used for assessing whether a random assignment is conducted properly, it is still controversial if this practice can really fulfill its promise [ 22 ]. The average treatment effects of major interest include (1) the difference in the perceived credibility of the government press release between the group receiving the government-endorsing information from a state-owned media outlet and that receiving the similar information from a citizen reporter, and (2) the difference in the perceived credibility of a medical expert’s statement with or without his government-sponsored title mentioned. We also ran OLS regression and linear interaction models for estimating heterogeneous treatment effects.

We found that the exposure to independent citizen journalism increased respondents’ trust in the government press release. A two-tailed t-test shows that the respondents who read CQ’s report gave higher ratings of credibility to MoC’s press release than those who read the PD report (45.98 versus 42.85, the difference is 3.13, two-sided p-value = 0.07, see Fig 1A ). More generally, we also found that, across all levels of the government, the general trust in them correlated positively with respondents’ perceived transparency of information concerning the outbreak ( Fig 1B ).

PPT PowerPoint slide
PNG larger image
TIFF original image

Trust in government press release after reading news from different sources (A), and government transparency in disease information and trust in government (B).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260961.g001

To further explore the heterogeneous effects of independent citizen journalism on reducing the authoritarian credibility deficit, we estimated several linear regression models including respondents’ demographics and virus-related variables (see S3-S5 Tables in S1 File for details). There was substantial evidence showing that the identified causal effect was driven by the respondents who were more critical. First, tapping into HK’s recent critical event, the 2019 anti-extradition protests, we found CQ’s report induced a greater trust on MoC’s press release among protest participants than among non-participants ( Fig 2A , 42.88 versus 35.01, the difference is 7.87, p = 0.003). Moreover, as the majority of protesters were relatively young, it’s therefore also worthwhile to investigate the causal heterogeneity across different age groups (18–80 in our sample). Just like the analysis on protest participation, we did find statistically significant and larger independent treatment effects among relatively younger (24–52) participants ( S3 Fig ). Please see section G in S1 File for details. Similarly, those who heard of CQ and favored media freedom in mainland China also showed a higher trust in the government press release after reading CQ’s report ( Fig 2B , 48.34 versus 41.90, the difference is 6.44, p = 0.001; Fig 2C , 45.17 versus 39.60, the difference is 5.57, p = 0.002).

Social movement Participation and trust in government press release (A), previous awareness of CQ and trust in government press release (B), and support for media freedom, information sources, and trust in government press release (C).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260961.g002

Finally, the manipulation checks are also consistent with our expectations. Respondents showed higher levels of trust in government press release as they perceived CQ to be an independent reporter (46.87, p < 0.001, see Fig 3A ). Similarly, compared to the credibility of PD report, on average, respondents rated CQ’s report with a higher level of trust (44.09 versus 53.36, the difference is 9.27, p < 0.001, see Fig 3B ).

CQ’s independence and trust in government press release (A), and trust in different sources of information (B).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260961.g003

Our study shows that, during a public health crisis, the credibility deficit of an authoritarian government can be substantially reduced by citizen journalism. Such an effect is especially salient among those citizens who are critical of the government. We draw four conclusions from our analysis.

First, as the number of newly confirmed cases has gradually flattened out in China and went up elsewhere, it has become the global priority to find a practical solution to reducing credibility deficit in risk communications in other authoritarian countries without China’s administrative capacity. The observed effects of citizen journalism from our experiment were moderate yet meaningful. What is worth mentioning here is that the effects of our informational treatments might be moderated by the fact that, given Hong Kong’s free internet and media environment, our respondents also had low-cost access to other information sources regarding Wuhan’s local conditions that might neutralize CQ’s reports. This informational decentralization can also help account for why the government-related title in our second experiment was unable to induce any difference in respondents’ trust in medical experts since they did not need to rely on government sources for information. This is especially worth noting since the effects were triggered simply by a brief visual treatment. More importantly, while the effects of risk communications tend to be dwarfed by those exerted by preventative measures themselves, they can still be quite substantial in absolute numbers on a population level [ 23 , 24 ].

Second, the effect is also strengthened by the finding that, even in an authoritarian country, one will trust the government more when his/her perceived government transparency in handling the outbreak is higher ( Fig 1B ). The fact that the effect is significant across all levels of government suggests that citizen journalism can help an authoritarian government enhance its credibility in both central decision-making and local implementation of public health policies.

Third, besides showing the average causal effect of independent citizen journalism in an authoritarian context, our research also unpacks several mechanisms driving it. Actually, one might wonder if our results were mainly driven by the regime’s loyal supporters. If this is the case, lifting the restrictions on citizen journalism probably won’t help an authoritarian government much in reducing its credibility deficit since loyalists would support it anyway. Moreover, there have also been various studies showing how destabilizing public health hazards can be to authoritarian countries [ 25 , 26 ], and a sudden removal of censorship might give potential rebels opportunities to mobilize and paralyze their governments’ ability to deal with such crises [ 27 ].

Our findings, by contrast, suggest otherwise and therefore should send a soothing message to authoritarian leaders who are facing the COVID-19 challenge. According to our analysis of causal heterogeneities, while the respondents who were participants of anti-extradition protests and supporters of media freedom in China had lower trust in the government press release to begin with, these potential dissidents however, upwardly adjusted their trust in it significantly more than their not-so-critical counterparts when they received the government-endorsing information from a non-official source. In other words, there can actually be a virtuous cycle between citizen journalism and government credibility under dictatorships.

Fourth, our results also have a profound implication for the state-society synergy in public health governance under authoritarian regimes. It has been well-established in the literature that social capital can not only help authoritarian governments provide more local public goods [ 28 ], but also promote better public health [ 29 – 31 ]. Our results offer yet another piece of evidence for how having a vibrant civil society where independent citizen journalism is able to thrive can reduce dictators’ credibility deficit during an epidemic outbreak.

Our study, however, has one major limitation. We only showed our respondents the kind of citizen reports that endorsed the government press release. We were constrained to identify one of CQ’s reports that could be juxtaposed symmetrically with a government press release related to the outbreak. Unfortunately, because CQ stopped twittering in early February, his January clip on the food supply at one of Wuhan’s supermarkets was the only one that qualified (What has to be emphasized here is that our experiment was administered after CQ disappeared from the public sight.). Does this affect CQ’s perceived credibility as an independent source and therefore undermine our argument? Fortunately, this issue is partially addressed by the effect of CQ’s independence we found ( Fig 3A ). Since the independence in citizen journalism implies that one’s reports won’t be always endorsing but also critical, counter-factually, this finding suggests that the endorsement effect is unlikely to disappear even when citizen journalists’ reports contradict the government’s announcements. In other words, even if we were only able to present CQ’s endorsement of the government policy, our respondents didn’t regard him as simply a mouthpiece.

In this race against the spread of the virus, our study shows that allowing some level of free flow of information can be a practical way for authoritarian governments that suffer from credibility deficit to improve public trust in their risk communications and induce people’s cooperative behavior in containing the contagion during the current pandemic outbreak.

Concluding remarks

The effects of citizen journalism on non-democratic regimes’ credibility deficit in risk communication during public health crises are only partially understood. In general, the traditional model of risk communication stresses the importance of facilitating the transmission of information from authoritative/official sources. Citizen journalism is, therefore, viewed as a positive factor that can not only provide more information that is inaccessible to government sources, but also proactively engage those who are affected to shape their risk perceptions. In the authoritarian context where some kind of censorship is often imposed, citizen journalism has been found to liberate people from propaganda through providing alternative information and aggravate dictators’ credibility deficit. However, little is known if citizen journalism in a dictatorship can conversely work in tandem with its authoritarian government to enhance the effectiveness of risk communications during a public health crisis.

To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to confirm the positive effect of citizen journalism on reducing the credibility deficit in public health governance in authoritarian countries. First of all, we took advantage of a narrow window of opportunity to conduct a survey experiment in Hong Kong during China’s COVID-19 outbreak. The timely research makes our findings less artificial and closer to reality. Second, compared to the previous study, we show that a citizen journalist’s report can enhance the credibility of dictatorships. Third, in addition to the average causal effect of citizen journalism on authoritarian credibility in risk communications during a public health crisis, our findings also reveal that the effect is especially salient on those critical citizens who used to participate in Hong Kong’s 2019 Anti-Extradition Protest and favor media freedom in China.

The study shows that authoritarian leaders can “borrow credibility” from citizen journalists during a public health incident. Granting citizens freedom of speech can make authoritarian regimes more, instead of less, credible. This implies that there can actually be a synergy between state and society in a dictatorship. Given our finding that critical citizens also tend to be more responsive to reports made by citizen journalists, it implies that even nondemocratic leaders can make themselves more trustworthy to potential dissenters through citizen journalism. Moreover, the kind of experimental manipulation our participants were exposed to was not simply about some generic information about COVID-19, but about an actual policy measure that might affect people’s behavior in real-life scenarios. This also renders our findings readily applicable to actual anti-virus campaigns in other authoritarian countries. Finally, based on our findings, we also open up a new avenue for future researchers to explore various ways in which authoritarian governments are able to reduce their credibility deficit. Especially, the conventional wisdom tends to focus on how international institutions can make them more trustworthy to foreign actors such as multinational companies and investors. Our study shows alternatively how they can also gain additional credibility by tapping into civil society groups for sources of independence. Future research therefore can explore other domestic actors and issues areas to enrich our understanding of “dictators’ credibility borrowing”.

Supporting information

S1 fig. the informed consent page..

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260961.s001

S2 Fig. Government title and credibility of a medical expert.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260961.s002

S3 Fig. Age and heterogeneous treatment effects.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260961.s003

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260961.s004

Acknowledgments

We thank Joan Barcelo, Alexandra Blackman, Yaoyao Dai, Kiwi Ting, and Rebecca Morton for their invaluable comments. We also appreciate the feedback from the seminar/conference participants at the Institute of Political Science, Academic Sinica, and the 2020 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association. All remaining errors are the authors’ responsibility.

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Theories of journalism.

Stephen D. Reese Stephen D. Reese School of Journalism, Moody College of Communication, The University of Texas at Austin
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.83
Published online: 31 August 2016

Journalism seeks to observe and communicate what it learns of social importance, something called news, and in doing so is always in the process of creating a public by bringing it into synchronized conversation with itself. Theories of journalism provide explanatory frameworks for understanding a complex combination of social practice, product, and institutional arrangement. Journalism’s late 20th-century professionalized, high modern version, which is still recognizable today, has continued to change, particularly with the disruptive effect of the Internet, as it has evolved to absorb other forms. The boundaries of profession and news organization have been destabilized within this rapidly shifting media terrain, but still there remain productive approaches for systematically organizing knowledge around the concept of journalism.

The early 20th-century perspectives on journalism—before becoming linked to the communication field and a more narrow media effects focus—were at home in the University of Chicago school of sociology, which emphasized community-based, multi-method participant observation. A sociology of news perspective resurfaced with more ethnographic research in newsrooms in the 1950s, and theories of journalism have continued to highlight the ethnographic method, especially in understanding the impact of technology on a more digitally-oriented journalism practice. A hierarchy of influences perspective, developed by Shoemaker and Reese, incorporates other perspectives beyond the ethnographic by considering factors at multiple levels of analysis that shape media content, the journalistic message system, from the micro to the macro: individual characteristics of specific newsworkers, their routines of work, organizational-level concerns, institutional issues, and the larger social system. At each level, one can identify the main factors that shape the symbolic reality constituted and produced by journalism, as well as how these factors interact across levels and compare across different contexts (e.g., national, technological).

A hierarchy of influences model worked well to disentangle the relationships among professionals and their routines, and the news organizations that housed them, which cohered into institutions. But journalism has been newly problematized, destabilizing and restructuring both the units and levels of analysis in journalism theorizing. The networked public sphere is constituted with new assemblages: of newswork, institutional arrangements, and global connections, which give rise to new emerging deliberative spaces. Journalism theories now have as much interest in process as product, in assemblage as outcome, but still need to be concerned with the nature of quality of these spaces. What shape do they take on and with what implications for healthy democratic discourse?

levels of analysis
networked journalism
media sociology
hierarchy of influences
deliberative spaces

Introduction

Journalism seeks to observe and communicate what it learns of social importance, something called news, and in doing so is always in the process of creating a public by bringing it into synchronized conversation with itself. Theories of journalism provide explanatory frameworks for understanding a complex combination of social practice, product, and institutional arrangement. Journalism’s late 20th-century professionalized, high modern version, which is still recognizable today, has continued to change, particularly with the disruptive effect of the Internet, as it has evolved to absorb other forms. Unlike many other more settled fields, journalism research has been obsessed with the very definition of its core concept—what journalism is. The boundaries of profession and news organization have been destabilized within this rapidly shifting media terrain, but still there remain productive approaches for systematically organizing knowledge around the concept of journalism. In this article I review some of these approaches using levels of analysis framework and consider ways this perspective must be adapted to new conceptions of this rapidly changing field.

Theories of journalism, as Löffelholz ( 2008 ) observed, come from diverse perspectives, beginning with early normative concerns leading to more empirical analysis of how journalists work. Adding a systems perspective attempted to position the individual as part of a larger system (e.g., Rühl, 1969 ) and to understand news as a cultural product. The early 20th-century research perspectives on journalism, before they became linked to the communication field and a more narrow media effects focus, were at home in the University of Chicago school of sociology, which emphasized community-based, multi-method participant observation including issues of communication and public opinion. Early figures like Robert Park had an interest in the newspaper and how it not just affected but created community itself by extending social networks—regarding communities as existing in communication. The post-WWII shift of sociological influence to Columbia University, and related communication research along with it, displaced this more holistic concern with a short-term effects, variable-analytic, social-psychology perspective on questions of interest to the burgeoning mass consumer industries—and to the mass media built on their advertising revenue.

Theories of journalism have largely been situated within this tradition of communication research more generally as it developed during this period. As a result they have shared a preoccupation with the large-scale mass media in the U.S. and Western Europe, and the professionals operating within those media institutions. Journalism has been regarded as having vital functions for the larger social system, leaving the task of research to explore the process of journalistic communication and ways audiences responded to news messages. This left relatively less room for more critical questions concerning how journalism fits within the larger social structure—including who makes news, what counts as news, and whose interests news serves. (Gitlin, 1978 ; Reese & Ballinger, 2001 ). Aligned with journalism and mass communication education—which in turn was concerned with training for media industries—research took on a strongly normative character in regarding journalism as a crucial underpinning of democratic society. That was what journalists themselves believed, serving as a justification for their professional status and legal protections.

Shift to a Sociology of News

Running counter to this process and effects tradition, a couple of early newsroom studies, in particular, signaled special concerns with journalism as a social practice. David Manning White’s ( 1950 ) classic study of the news “gatekeeper” suggested that news is what the “newspaperman” says it is, while Warren Breed’s ( 1955 ) study of social control in the newsroom, showed how journalists absorbed news policy, even if that policy was not always explicit, and how the tension between the different motivations of journalists and the (often more conservative) owner needed to be reconciled to make the system work. As Reese and Ballinger ( 2001 ) have argued, the findings of White and Breed were safely interpreted at the time within the prevailing narrative, or received history of the field, as upholding the status quo: namely that the gatekeeper and newspaper publisher would select stories in the interest of the community of which they were part. This blunted the critical edge and subversive quality of such research, which threatened to make journalism decision-making newly problematic.

Journalism professionals have historically adhered to a philosophical, realist view of the world in which news of external events is “out there” waiting to be gathered and disseminated. But this process is a social construction determined by a number of larger forces, making the search for these forces and understanding how they interact a logical focus of theoretical development. Theories of journalism have followed a sociological turn, a perspective that brings with it questions of power, control, structures, institutions, class, and community: all concepts that, as Waisbord ( 2014 ) observes, have been applied to journalism research more than other communication subfields, yielding an area often called “media sociology.” Broadly speaking, this approach to journalism ties social structures to symbolic formations, seeking to understand how social reality takes shape and foregrounding normative concerns of how well journalism is working under these arrangements.

Social protest and upheaval in the 1960s brought greater concern about how journalism was implicated in a discredited power structure, leading to greater interest in the inner workings of institutional journalism—as represented most visibly by a number of newsroom ethnographies. Stonbely ( 2013 ) identifies a group of such studies that, after a long hiatus, followed in the later 60s and 70s the earlier example of White and Breed. These studies, she argues, represent a “cornerstone” of American media sociology, covering that “legacy” period of media development centered around a handful of major broadcast and print media that commanded mass audiences and, for the most part, their trust. Among these she identifies Edward Jay Epstein’s ( 1974 ) News from Nowhere (about network television news), Mark Fishman’s ( 1980 ) Manufacturing the News , Gaye Tuchman’s ( 1978 ) Making News (about local newspapers), and Herbert Gans’ ( 1979 ) Deciding What’s News (about national newsmagazines and television). They all broke with the prevailing approaches to communication research by emphasizing news as an organizational product that had to be socially constructed, not simply transmitted to the audience. These became classic examples of newsroom sociology, time-consuming but rich in detail, and until recently served to anchor our understanding of how newswork happens.

The sociology of news has continued to highlight the ethnographic method, long marginalized within mainstream sociology. The method, however, has enjoyed a resurgence in recent years across the social sciences with its greater capacity to engage public interest with accessible storytelling—indeed, a quality more closely aligned with journalism itself. Ethnography and its participant observation have proved especially useful in understanding with close observation the impact of technology on a more digitally-oriented journalism practice. A new wave of news ethnographies has been precipitated particularly by the migration of news online. Prominent examples include the work of Boczkowski ( 2004 , 2010 ), especially in showing how technology has affected the newsroom organization and practice. His work on Argentinian newsrooms shows the paradox of striving in an age of digital abundance to conform to the news competition. Ryfe’s ( 2012 ) analysis of three American newsrooms showed that journalists have not adapted very well to change, using the tensions embedded in their profession to reconfirm and justify the same procedures they have used since before the industry upheaval.

Usher ( 2014 ) provides the most recent single-newsroom ethnography within the Gans tradition of the New York Times , choosing an elite news organization as the embodiment of the journalism profession. Her participant observation shows what happens when a traditional and powerful institution must adapt to the inescapable digital world, that despite the major technological shifts, “many of the routines and practices of news production observed in the golden era of news ethnography remain constant” (p. 228). What is more, the routines surrounding key values of immediacy, interactivity, and participation show remarkable similarities to a diverse host of other online news settings (Domingo & Paterson, 2011 ; Paterson & Domingo, 2008 ).

Levels of Analysis: Hierarchy of Influences Perspective

Although ethnographies provide a nuanced, insider view of a social setting, they can privilege the immediate context of the newsmaking experience and work toward organizational functionalism. That is, everything observed is easily assumed to be there for a good reason, and selecting one organizational site elevates it as the key player in news gatekeeping decisions. Thus, beyond the first-hand observation of newswork, primarily within an organizational setting, a broader conception of the sociology of news is needed that incorporates the ethnographic perspective but includes other levels of analysis, including individual professional issues and larger macro social structures impinging on journalism. A hierarchy of influences model, developed by Shoemaker and Reese ( 2014 , 1996 ), does this by considering factors at multiple levels of analysis that shape media content, the journalistic message system, from the micro to the macro: individual characteristics of specific newsworkers, their routines of work, organizational-level concerns, institutional issues, and larger social-systems. The model “takes into account the multiple forces that simultaneously impinge on the media and suggest how influence at one level may interact with that at another” ( 2014 , p. 1). At each level, one can identify the main factors that shape the symbolic reality constituted and produced by journalism, how these factors interact across levels and compare across different contexts (e.g., national, technological).

This approach raises, especially at the individual level, the notion of structure and agency. As a human activity, journalism naturally involves the agency of individuals, which is both constrained and enabled by the structures surrounding them. Ascribing relatively more agency to individuals leads to a greater emphasis on the personal characteristics that guide them (the crusading journalist myth and biographical tradition underscore this tendency); an emphasis on macro structures, on the other hand, tends to de-emphasize this personal agency. A political economic perspective, for example, has the effect of rendering journalists as mere tools of class and other interests. Taking these issues into account, journalism research can be organized by these hierarchical levels as reviewed below, with examples of new conceptual issues.

On the most micro level, we assume that individual creative, professional practitioners matter and knowing who they are helps understand the larger journalistic project—who is being drawn to the profession, how adequately they reflect society, and what professional values they support. The individual level of analysis considers the personal traits of newsworkers, news values they adhere to, professional roles they take on, and other demographic features (e.g., gender, race, class). In spite of the traditional notion of professional “objective” detachment, we assume these characteristics matter in their work. Journalists make decisions based on psychological-level attributes, but they operate within a web of constraints.

Thus, this level of analysis considers the relative autonomy of individuals, how they are both shaped by, contribute to, and identity with their surrounding organizations. Defining news professionals as those working in major decision-making capacities for media organizations, Weaver and colleagues (e.g., Weaver, Beam, Brownlee, Voakes, & Wilhoit, 2007 ) have tracked the composition of that group over several years, along with how they perceive their roles. Surveying journalists working for traditional news organizations shows perceptions by those individuals most invested in the shrinking professional core. They see journalism heading in the wrong direction, have declining job satisfaction, but give greater importance to their role in analyzing complex problems and investigating official claims (Wilnat & Weaver, 2014 ).

Although many such studies seek to capture a description of the profession as a whole, the individual level certainly draws attention to the fact that there is no single professional type, not even within national cultures. As professional environments are shifting rapidly, analysis at this level helps understand how professional roles relate to larger structures, serving as a means of adaptation and survival. In the dynamic Chinese media context, for example, Hassid ( 2011 ) has identified four types of journalists: American style professionals, communist professionals (“throat and tongue” of the Communist Party), workaday journalists (corrupt, anything for a price), and advocate professionals, who push the envelope and are committed to ideals of transparency, openness, and public participation. Geall ( 2013 ) argues that these are the professionals especially equipped for survival, who can exploit the openings provided by the chaotic aspects and contradictions of the Chinese media environment.

The routines level is concerned with those patterns of behavior that form the immediate structures of newswork. If journalism is primarily a social practice, routines are the ways of working that constitute that practice. They may include those unstated rules and ritualized enactments that are not always made explicit. In studying these routines, we assume that power is exercised within organizations—not always by idiosyncratic dictates by leaders but through establishing a pattern of practices that serve the needs of the organization, adapt to requirements of news sources, control the workflow, and give it a meaningful structure. These range from deadline and space requirements to pack journalism and the strategically enacted procedures (e.g., using quotations and balancing) designed to invoke “objectivity” itself. News routines serve the needs of journalists and the organization, but they also have come to embody considerations about the audience, what it will find acceptable and interesting in the forms of news values.

But these routines have been unsettled, as news media adapt to digital flows and metrics, affording the ability to present information that allows greater user participation. From a time when journalists had only a vague conception of their audience, reading and viewing now can be monitored in real time, leading to new value being placed on what is trending, shared, and endorsed. News aggregators, for example, both within and outside traditional news organizations, have had to develop new routines of screenwork, continually checking the incoming streams of information, monitoring what types of stories drive audience traffic, and finding ways to appropriately verify and advance what Coddington ( 2015 ) calls “second-hand story-telling,” with routines that support transparency. They help to reconcile the tension between the professional imperative of control and a more open participatory news space online. This “second-order” newswork still maintains a professional ethos, distant from the eyewitness field reporting professionals have always valorized, yet still holding that ethos as an aspiration.

Organizational

Associated with the organizational level in particular, the ethnographic approach to journalism contributed the insight, now well accepted, that news is an organizational product. Edward Epstein’s News from nowhere did that for television news, showing its organizational constraints and structure in how the location of bureaus dictated what events were available to be translated into daily news flow. Now the walls of these organizations have become more fluid as they enter into collaborative relationships to produce news, and they take on a range of new emerging forms from the large-scale enterprise of daily news gathering to the small-staff, minimalist blogging operation. The key question at this level is “how does it work?” In that respect, the early analysis of Breed ( 1955 ) of social control in the newsroom continues to be relevant today in considering how the different parts of the organization work together to maintain itself and accomplish its goals.

These tensions are particularly revealed during times of social change. Lee and Chan ( 2008 ) show, for example, that although Hong Kong has a strong tradition of journalistic professionalism, self-censorship has increased following the handover to the mainland government, bringing greater political pressure on local media. News managers try to minimize conflicts by assigning sensitive stories to less experienced journalists, warning them ambiguously to “be smart,” or justifying their instructions with a professional rationale (“be objective”). Since the so-called “Umbrella Revolution,” news organizations there have faced greater challenges in smoothing over these conflicts with owners, many of whom have business ties to the mainland.

Institutional

At the next, more macro, socio-institutional level is concerned with the “inter-organizational field,” how the various organizations doing news work cohere into a larger institution. The media institution in turn enters into structured dependency relationships with other major systemic players: including the state, public relations, and advertising. Benson ( 2004 ) has advocated bringing the sociology of media (systems) back into the analysis, by emphasizing the journalistic institutional field, deconstructing the media system (especially cross-nationally) into its institutional components. This represents the meso-level environment for media—the interplay of economic, political, and cultural factors—lying between organization and society as a whole.

The new institutionalism perspective imported from political science treats the “media” as a political actor in relationship with others (e.g., Ryfe, 2006 ). This approach includes a historical dimension, which helps explain the emergence of practices and norms as a contingent outcome. In showing how the news media have in common their goals of seeking legitimacy, access to information, and making money, institutionalist analysis helps explain their homogeneity (Cook, 1998 ; Sparrow, 1999 ). Bourdieu’s ( 2005 ) field theory is similar to institutionalism in identifying spheres of action, which must be understood in relation to each other, and which in the case of the journalistic field implies autonomy, homogeneity, and is a result of a path dependent historical trajectory. We understand the journalistic field to be structured by combinations of economic and cultural capital, and although there is individual agency the field conditions the actions of its members.

Both fields and institutions bring up questions of where the boundaries lie among these institutions as they jockey for power and how these interdependencies shape the news product. Power flows not only from the state to the media, but the other way around in a process of mutual adaptation. Fox News, for example, has dictated to the Republican Party as it seeks to manage the presidential campaign by creating a debate forum for aspiring candidates, some of whom had contracts with Fox for on-air appearances. At the institutional level we can better recognize the even more complex nature of mediatization: a distinctive stage in the long-term development of contemporary mass democracies in which political processes have grown more or less dependent on the mass media and shaped themselves accordingly.

Social System

The most macro, social system level is concerned with traditional theories of society and power as they relate to journalism. Much of early U.S. communication research was predicated on a benign, functional pluralism view of power in democratic society that assumed a self-righting balance of interests. But when journalism decision-making becomes problematic, powerful interests become directly implicated, and more critical political economic explanations consider journalism to be an extension of class and corporate power. Herman and Chomsky’s ( 1988 ) propaganda model, for example, gives journalists relatively little autonomy as they work to uphold the interests of their sources, advertisers, and other elites. In a more subtle elaboration, long pre-dating the propaganda model, hegemony theory takes Antonio Gramsci’s extension of Marx to explain how power relations become naturalized, even while granting media some relative autonomy from class power and interests. Ideology explains how the social system hangs together as the media project ideas and meaning in the service of power and interests. Violations of paradigmatic boundaries in a society require repair work and help explain media representations of deviance and marginalization of dissent.

One doesn’t need to take a Marxian perspective to recognize that journalism and media institutions function within a larger social system, and these systems increasingly span national boundaries. The most direct way to address factors at the social system level is through cross-national comparison, an important theoretical development at this level. This comparative approach applied to professional journalism is exemplified by Hanitzsch et al. ( 2011 ), who mounted a survey across 18 countries from a mix of news organizations on their role perceptions, epistemological orientations and ethical views, a design that allowed them to directly assess the influence of national context on the perceptions of journalists themselves. Their research raises the question: To what extent is there a global journalistic culture? They found three major clusters of similar countries classified as Western, peripheral-Western, and developing/transitional, but generally shared is a sense of detachment and non-involvement in their perceived professional roles, and in being a watchdog of government (and to some extent business). They differ on the value of interventionism, the promotion of certain goals of social change, but in general there is evidence for a universal ideology and professional identity.

Utility of the Hierarchy of Influences

As key concepts developed within journalism research, it has become helpful to unpack them across a levels of analysis perspective. Professionalism, for example, can be seen to operate in different ways across each of the five levels (Reese, 2001 ), as can another key concept, news gatekeeping: the winnowing of a vast amount of possible news items into a constricted space. Shoemaker and Vos ( 2009 ) examine gatekeeping across the five levels, discerning the forces at each level operating to shape news decision-making. These questions have been more focused on specific editorial decision-makers, but an increasing online abundance of news and social media platforms, capacity and audience interactivity require a similar rethinking of this concept. In spite of online abundance, news decisions are still being made, but in different locations and sequences. This seemingly flattened hierarchy of gatekeeping authority may disguise the actuality, as Vos and Heinderycks ( 2015 ) argue, of a persistent homogeneity to certain stories, and missing important others altogether (e.g., financial crisis of 2008 ).

A hierarchical model has encouraged the sorting out of micro, meso and macro levels, and provides a framework for analyzing the operation of combined factors. Evaluating the contribution of multiple levels simultaneously helps yield greater explanatory power. Survey of journalists, for example, by Weaver et al. ( 2007 ) examined the contribution of different nested contextual factors on journalistic work (organization, medium, etc.) This has been extended to include the social-system level in a hierarchical approach to factors shaping international journalism (Hanitzsch et al., 2010 ).

New Geography of Media Sociology

For a number of reasons, then, the hierarchy of influences has been a valuable guide to theorizing journalism, but to what extent must it be reconsidered in light of the major changes in the media landscape? The journalism of the 20th Century was synonymous with the prevailing industrial forms. News was what news organizations produced, and journalists were the professionals who worked for them. A hierarchy of influences approach worked well with this model to disentangle the relationships among professionals and their routines, and the news organizations that housed them, which cohered into institutions. How does this levels of analysis framework adapt to the new media world where the lines are not as tidy?

The news industry and profession have changed dramatically in the last two decades, with the internet severing the association of advertising with the news product, undermining the once robust subsidy provided by those seeking the mass audiences media were able to command. As a result, large-scale news organizations have faced serious economic disruption, along with easy digital access to free content threatening the unique role of professional journalism. Anderson, Bell, and Shirky ( 2012 ) put a positive face on the recent decade’s “post-industrial” effects on the news ecosystem as an increase in freedom to communicate beyond the traditional publishing and broadcasting models. This freedom has brought an explosion of digital practices and platforms, with in many respects new, more effective journalistic forms—but at a cost to institutional clarity and coherence. In the process, these changes have made the definition of journalist and news organization increasingly problematic.

In accommodating the ethnographic perspective, the hierarchal model has not precluded the variable-analytic, effects-on-content tradition, but the new online journalistic ecosystem has moved theorizing farther away from that tradition in adopting more spatially-oriented models of networks, spheres and fields. As the boundaries of journalism have shifted to include more citizen interaction and global connectivity, various terms have been used to describe the new journalistic eco-system, but they all suggest a more networked quality. This extends to the broader socio-political deliberative arena in general to which journalism contributes, a space now often loosely deemed a “networked public sphere,” or even a “global networked sphere.”

To refer more specifically to journalism’s new reality shaped by the internet, Benkler ( 2011 ), for example, uses “networked 4th estate” to refer, along with professional journalists, to those citizen and other social movements that combine to form a more decentralized democratic discourse, revealing a redistribution of how content is created and shared. One of the most prominent writers in the “future of news,” Jeff Jarvis ( 2006 ), uses “networked journalism” to refer to the new collaborative relationships between professional and citizen in creating new information. Journalists have become nodes in this larger networked journalism, a “diffused capacity to record information, share it, and distribute it” (Haak, Parks, & Castells, 2012 , p. xx). At the more formal news industry level, Anderson, Bell, and Shirky ( 2012 ) use the “networked institution” concept to capture the need for news organizations themselves to become more collaborative. These concepts suggest that journalism can no longer be easily understood within organizational containers but extends across traditional, more well-defined boundaries through connectivity in unpredictable ways. These spatial metaphors and orienting concepts—whether networks, fields, or spheres—point simultaneously to the blurring of lines between professional and citizen, between one organization and another as they develop more collaborative partnerships and work across digital platforms.

This is a different way of thinking of news compared to studies of production within institutions. Adding a more organic quality to the picture, leads to terms like news “ecology” and “eco-system” (Anderson, 2013 ), still suggesting interconnected but disparate units, all participating in a similar space with a differentiation of roles. Traditional legacy media provide an anchor for smaller publications, bloggers and citizens, who react to and supplement what happens in the larger press. Thus, the practice, product, and institutional dimensions are captured in this new metaphor of networked journalism. The eco-system shift is revealed in new forms of newswork that theories of journalism must take into account. The relentless flow of abundant information has led to a new breed of news aggregators (referred to earlier) who add value through digesting, repackaging information—stripping it down to its core components. The news narratives traditionally housed within article story structures now get broken down into smaller “atomic units,” which can be restructured, reordered, annotated, aggregated, and widely shared—ordering them back up into different narrative structures (Coddington, 2015 ). Thus, this potential for connectivity extends even at the content-structure level to the elements of a traditional news story, which can be more easily disaggregated and redeployed.

Of course, this flow of dis- and re-aggregated information would not be possible were it not for the computational power now available. Journalism, like other forms of knowledge-production, has encountered its big data, or data-driven, moment, which has led to theoretical shifts to better understand the restructuring of news and potential for interactivity with users. From a professional vantage point, the effects of this computational power on journalism take on several closely related forms. From an early concern with “precision journalism,” when journalists were encouraged to use the tools of social science for more rigorous insights, other terms have emerged in recent years to capture this phenomenon (Coddington, 2014 ). Data journalism, loosely employed, refers to the use of data by journalists to gather and present stories, merging with web design and visualization to allow massive amounts of information to be marshaled and made available for crowdsourcing analytics. Access to big data tools brings both greater analytical power to journalists but also changes the way they can structure stories to allow greater utility for the audience. Regarding professional practice, a “computational journalism” is regarded by Hamilton and Turner ( 2009 ) as embracing both, bringing “algorithms, data, and social science to supplement the accountability functions of journalism” (p. 2). Through algorithms the audience itself has a more interactive capacity to learn and tailor news consumption based on personal traits and patterns.

Technology has reshaped the journalistic field in a more general way by importing new values. As news organizations have relied on those from outside the professional field for digital expertise, the values of the technology culture have become linked with journalistic practice. The open source concept, for example, is both a practical approach to coding but also a philosophy of sharing (it makes transparent the DNA of its design). Lewis and Usher ( 2013 ) argue that the ethos of open source—embedded in hacker culture and emphasizing iteration, tinkering, transparency, and participation—has important implications for journalism, drawing it out from its closed professional boundaries into greater transparency.

New Methodological and Conceptual Challenges

Capturing the workings of these new eco-systems brings new challenges to the traditional ethnographic method. The ethnographer must decide the appropriate “site,” identify the “social actors,” and describe their practices. But when news becomes more diffused in its production, with journalists working and communicating remotely, or in small organizations loosely aligned with a larger parent company, or dispersed across platforms, the single site becomes more difficult to select (e.g., Cottle, 2007 ). How can ethnography be done on decentralized, deterritorialized communities? What is there to observe?

In keeping with the “networked journalism” perspective, newer efforts fittingly have shifted away from a location-based “factory floor” ethnography. Howard ( 2002 ) has demonstrated the utility of a “network ethnography”: “The process of using ethnographic field methods on cases and field sites selected using social network analysis” (p. 561). In his analysis, he identifies a distributed “e-politics” community, not based in a single organization but in various agencies, party and campaign staffs, and individual consultants—a loosely configured professional group of digital tool developers for political communication. He locates the critical actors through their strategically located position in the network that links them together and targets interviews accordingly.

Beyond these methodological challenges, the new eco-system requires new conceptual tools. In social network analysis, connections typically are found among homogeneous nodes (whether people or news hyperlinks), but related to the network is the richer concept of assemblage , which can include human and non-human, material and non-material, combined into a nexus of meaningful integration. This concept is useful in many areas of social science to capture dynamic phenomena spilling out of existing categories, becoming recombined in new ways, and not as easily identified within a single level of analysis. An assemblage can be a contingent set of relationships to accomplish shifting and transitory social objectives not otherwise defined by formal institutions. In that respect, journalism is not some naturally existing category, but a complex and contingent assemblage—less product than process.

Technology is at the heart of this transformational connectivity, affecting journalism’s tools, processes, and ways of thinking. Rather than regarding technology as an exogenous force making its effects felt from the outside on journalism, it increasingly must be taken into account as “making a difference” as it becomes integrated into journalistic practice. This has led to new ways of theorizing socio-technical systems and examining their interconnections, such as Latour’s Actor Network Theory (ANT), borrowed from science studies (reviewed in Turner, 2005 ). This radically descriptive approach blurs the human/technological lines, rendering both “actants” in an “ontologically flat” perspective. From a levels perspective ANT doesn’t make the same distinction between individual-level factors and routines, merging them into an integrated nexus. More broadly, Lewis and Westlund ( 2014 ) have advocated approaching cross-media work, the integration of multiple platforms, as a “system of actors, actants, audiences, activities engaged in complex set of media activities” (p. 34).

The assemblage concept has richer utility than its association with ANT. Anderson ( 2013 ) argues more broadly that newswork itself is one of “assemblage” and “can be envisioned and described as the continuous process of networking the news” (p. 172) across “news products, institutions, and networks . . . drawing together a variety of objects, big and small, social and technological, human and non-human” (p. 4). In the case of “news objects,” these are the things available for inclusion into larger assemblages. He maps online hyperlinks in the Philadelphia community to show a form of assemblage within a news ecosystem, “pointing to a pattern of iterative pyramiding in which key web sites positioned within highly particular communities of interest act as bridges to larger, more diffused digital communities” (Anderson, 2010 , p. 289).

This idea directs attention outside of journalism organizations to those places where interaction with journalism plays an integral part, especially in political communication. Assemblages can be viewed as a combination of heterogeneous elements oriented toward a given task (including semantic elements, messages, frames). Chadwick ( 2011 ) argues that, facilitated by digital platforms, political information cycles are complex assemblages of modular units, with permeable boundaries among them, which can only be understood in their relationships with each other. In the “hybrid media system” he designates assemblage as both process and event:

multiple, loosely coupled individuals, groups, sites, and temporal instances of interaction involving diverse yet highly interdependent news creators and media technologies that plug and unplug themselves from the news-making process, often in real time (p. 64).

Recent studies of political campaigns uses the concept to capture the relational aspects of mobilization, where elements are assembled in ways that have an identity, outside of a more formally constituted organization or institution (e.g., Kreis, 2012 ). Studying the more personal dimension of political field campaigns Nielsen ( 2012 ) finds ad hoc combinations of staffers, volunteers, and part-timers, that vary in their allegiance to hierarchy and length of their commitment.

Networked assemblages can still be located within specific levels of analysis, but they encourage reordering relationships and rethinking a linear process of influence in favor of constantly changing interest clusters driven by information entrepreneurs. Traditional political communication studies, for example, at the institutional level have treated news production as responding to state actors as it relays information to citizens, either in a cascading activation process (Entman, 2003 ) or through the indexing of news construction to the boundaries of debate within the political system (Bennett, 1990 ). Elite circuits of information exchange among institutional players, however, don’t map onto this relationship so easily. As Davis ( 2007 ) has argued, policy-making networks—a form of assemblage of elite actors—constitute micro-spheres of power which don’t correspond to representative politics. Journalists are integral, often captive, parts of these networks, not just the recipients of political newsworthy information which yields communicative output.

Assemblages within a Levels Framework

This new geography of journalism has problematized and destabilized both the units and levels of analysis in journalism theorizing. Because of these disruptions, much of the most important effort in recent years has been directed at the very definition of journalism and its boundaries with other fields (Carlson & Lewis, 2015 ). As a professional issue journalism becomes a jurisdictional project, policing its boundaries and defending its prerogatives. This can also be thought as a process of repair and maintenance of the journalistic “paradigm” (e.g., Reese, 1990 ), an ideological process similar to that captured at the social-system level of analysis. These concerns resemble Zelizer’s ( 1993 ) introduction of the “interpretive communities” concept to explain how journalists come to collective understandings of their work through shared discourse—a frame that extends beyond the strictly formal tenets of the profession itself. Despite the contested boundaries around the journalistic units of analysis, whether profession or organization, these boundary actions can also be identified across the levels of analysis. In this section, the levels of influence are considered in how they map onto new forms of assemblage.

Certain norms and routines, such as verification and sourcing, serve as boundary objects or markers, and are used to distinguish between journalism practiced by professionals and what they deem as less worthy practices. Individual organizations, such as the New York Times , seek to differentiate themselves from less acceptable entities as WikiLeaks, suspect because of its statelessness and non-institutionalized relationship with official sources (Coddington, 2012 ). The institutional level points to how mainstream journalism experiences an identity confusion, given the fuzzy borders between it and partisan news organizations such as Fox News, or comedic platforms such as The Daily Show and the former Colbert Report. That brings into question the homogeneity of the institutional field, violating the assumption for both Bourdieu and Institutionalists but making the process of boundary work more theoretically important.

As suggested earlier, the work of journalism and many of our theoretical questions are not so easily nested now within a set of hierarchical levels. Societal changes force a re-examination of the relationship between individuals and larger structures. That is, the aggregates traditionally signaled by levels—whether community, organization, or nation—are containers that don’t have the same meaning as they once did, as new structures are woven outside of and through institutional frameworks. As Castells ( 1996 ) argues, we need to rethink particularly the fundamental issue of identity, given that people “increasingly organize their meaning not around what they do, but on the basis of what they are, or believe they are” (p. 3). They are no longer as easily described by their individual markers of group membership. As a result, research needs to be more cautious with what it claims about the explanatory power of traditional demographic and other classifications when it comes to journalists (and other creative workers). For example, technology has brought new pressures on journalists, increasing the velocity of incoming information and need for multi-tasking, but it has also given them the ability to create a personal brand. Using social media such as Twitter can create personal reach beyond anything possible before, meaning they are not so easily subsumed within their organizational container.

The idea of assemblage is appealing in reflecting the reality of new configurations, suggesting elements that cut across several levels of analysis. But that means the boundaries between levels are not always as clear. Routines of newswork, for example, must now accommodate the combination of individual workers and their tools, combining individuals and their techniques into actor-networks. And “technology” has become a multi-scalar phenomenon, a nexus of actants not easily located at any one level. Previous theorizing reasoned from structures to predict symbolic expressions found in news coverage and mediated representations (“influences on content”), but this content itself now is not so easily detached from the hierarchical structures. Symbolic expression becomes a resource for inclusion in an assemblage. Nevertheless, even in a dramatically restructured news environment, hierarchical power—not the least of which the State—is still with us and reasserting itself in many areas, even if deployed through different means. And much of the work of journalism continues to occur in organized, institutionalized settings. This is true even for non-news organizations that practice journalism as a part of their social mission. Advocacy NGOs, such as Human Rights Watch, investigate, report and disseminate information, not only to provide to traditional media organizations journalist but to share directly with their stakeholders (Powers, 2015 ).

The hierarchy of influences presents a useful standard against which to measure the destabilization of journalism and realignment of forces, and to incorporate explanatory power. The idea of a radically contingent and ever-shifting assemblage is at odds with the drive in social science to find predictable aggregates of social material, congealing into institutions that have a history and life of their own. Assemblages are still located within a framework of power, even if not so intuitively, and these larger structures add explanatory value. Benson ( 2014 ) has cautioned against the tendency of perspectives like actor-network theory to simply describe these new configurations of professionals and practices, to “follow the actors,” advocating instead that they be explained within larger structures. And a levels of analysis framework reminds scholars to identify in which larger macro structures their phenomena of interest are located.

New Global Assemblages

The changing theoretical landscape for journalism must be positioned against the forces of globalization, which brings a “stretching” of social relations, connecting people at a distance, and “compression” as they interact with simultaneity and synchronicity. The idea of “global journalism” brings another kind of assemblage. Certainly, there has been in recent years a greater international emphasis in journalism theorizing, which brings greater emphasis on the social-system level. The growing use of cross-national research designs allow for testing the influence of the national social-system on journalism and help untangle institutional-level variables—showing, for example, how the extent to which media rely on commercial support as part of the political economic field shapes media practice (e.g., Benson, 2013 ). But emphasis on institutional fields within national cultures may overestimate the degree of national journalistic homogeneity. Certain components of a journalistic field—such as television, and increasingly online news—may be more likely to converge toward a more global standard, while the printed press, more firmly rooted in historical styles, may be less likely to change. So the social-system level is not synonymous with the national, and assemblages help alert us to new configurations.

Corcoran and Fahy ( 2009 ) take a more pan-national approach to global journalism, examining how power flows within and across national contexts through elite-oriented media, whether the International New York Times , Wall St. Journal , or in their case the Financial Times . The FT is global in the sense that it has a privileged place in European Union discourse, with a core audience among globalized elites doing business in Europe and Brussels. Journalists became part of networks of information flow that support elite structures, leading the authors to suggest a “cosmopolitanism embedded in the transnational culture of European elites, whose material interests stretch beyond national boundaries and whose social imaginary is nourished by elite media such as the FT” (p. 110).

Globalization adds a different dimension that works beyond these nested levels-of-analysis hierarchies to produce something of the “global” embedded in local subnational spaces. Global phenomena operate at multiple scales and are not neatly located on a continuum ranging from local to international. Sassen ( 2006 ) points to not only the disassembling of the state, but reconstituted arrangements: new global assemblages of, in her case, territory, authority, and rights. Ethnographic analysis of newswork need not be abandoned in the search for new globalized forms of journalism. Research may take the form of case studies with thick description where these new combinations may be properly explored. But this more subtle aspect of global spaces raises the possibility of new sites for investigation. For example Firdaus ( 2012 ) has studied Al Jazeera journalists working in Malaysia, signifying a subnational, “glocal” journalistic space embedded within the global media-hub city of Kuala Lumpur.

In another approach to global journalism, Berglez ( 2008 ) advocates a new way of analyzing news from a content-based perspective that takes into account its deterritorialized quality. News texts can be examined empirically for their “global outlook,” to the extent that they draw wider connections, reflecting a different epistemological stance:

The national outlook puts the nation-state at the center of things when framing social reality, while the global outlook instead seeks to understand and explain how economic, political, social and ecological practices, processes and problems in different parts of the world affect each other, are interlocked, or share commonalities (p. 3).

Mediated Spaces

The networked public sphere is constituted with new assemblages: of newswork, institutional arrangements, and global connections, which give rise to new emerging deliberative spaces. Journalism theories now have as much interest in process as product, in assemblage as outcome, but still need to be concerned with understanding the nature of quality of these spaces. What shape do they take on and with what implications for healthy democratic discourse?

Journalism research has a strong tradition of equating these spaces to a mapping of media content, and content-based studies are growing in number with vast amounts of media material available for analysis. Certainly, big data and related computational tools have begun to allow the kind of analysis more consistent with the new ecosystem at a network level of analysis. This is particularly true in research on online content that takes the hyperlink as the fundamental connecting feature, which allows the mapping of the networked space, including blogo- and Twitter-spheres based on a post- and Tweet-centric space. These analyses often provide striking visualizations of the patterns, but structures of these networks must still be related to larger structures of which they are a part. In explicating the idea of these “mediated” spaces, the challenge, perhaps counter-intuitive, is to conceive of them from a less media-centric perspective. Theories of journalism, by their nature, tend to begin with organized journalism and work out from there, but this may overstate its influence and hinder a fuller understanding journalism’s position. Journalism is itself an assemblage and a part of, albeit an important one, of others that lie both inside and outside of institutionalized structures. The assemblage concept alerts us to wider combinations of elements that constitute new mediated spaces, and these configurations must be identified, while a levels of analysis framework will continue to help organize explanatory efforts.

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Blurring Boundaries of Journalism in Digital Media pp 1–12 Cite as

An Introduction to the Study of Journalism and Its Boundaries

María-Cruz Negreira-Rey ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8945-2641 6 ,
Jorge Vázquez-Herrero ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9081-3018 6 ,
José Sixto-García ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2988-0975 6 &
Xosé López-García ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1873-8260 6
First Online: 07 December 2023

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Part of the book series: Studies in Big Data ((SBD,volume 140))

We introduce the book's scope, based on the concept of the blurring boundaries of journalism. The chapters are presented following the structure of the book. The contributions offer an overview of the limits that define journalism—its actors, models and practices—in today's hybrid communication system. Their contributions are framed in the discussion of the principles of journalism, the strategies and models for sustainability in the digital environment, the relationship with old and new actors, the evolution of formats and narratives in digital journalism, the adaptation to mobile and social platforms for news use, and the challenge for journalism posed by artificial intelligence.

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Negreira-Rey, MC., Vázquez-Herrero, J., Sixto-García, J., López-García, X. (2023). An Introduction to the Study of Journalism and Its Boundaries. In: Negreira-Rey, MC., Vázquez-Herrero, J., Sixto-García, J., López-García, X. (eds) Blurring Boundaries of Journalism in Digital Media. Studies in Big Data, vol 140. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43926-1_1

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How To Find Interesting And Unique Sources And Case Studies

September 27, 2021 (Updated September 27, 2021 )

Finding the most suitable person to centre your articles on is like adding in a secret ingredient to your dish – it pulls the whole thing together. But finding relevant case studies can be quite a feat – you have to make sure they’re the most relevant person, that they’re offering insightful comments, and, most importantly, that they’re available.

During the pandemic, face-to-face meetings – where you can develop a rapport and feed off interviewees answers and energy – have not been a possibility, leaving only virtual options. Journalists have had to find creative new ways to interview sources including Zoom, voice notes, DMs, emails, and texts. But how do you go about finding the right people in the first place?

Using Social Media, From Reddit To Facebook Groups

As a reporter who has worked for various national outlets, I had my usual go-to places for case studies including Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Meanwhile, my emails were also an archive of contacts willing to chat to me. The more I reached out to people and the more I wrote, I started developing a diverse contact book that I could come back to – remember you can also use the same experts for more than one piece, or ask them to put you in touch with the relevant people.

But, ultimately, you still need to know where to start. It can be tempting to just put a #JournoRequest call out on Twitter, but you’ll often find better results by finding people yourself, rather than just letting the same people come to you.

“I generally think that if you’re trying to look for really high quality case studies, really original stuff, it’s not the best place to find them,” agrees Sophie Gallagher , an award-winning freelance journalist speaking at a Journo Resources masterclass. “You just get a load of journalists, who are also just sat on Twitter, replying to you. It’s self selecting, it’s people coming to you.”

Instead, Sophie says her trick is to use Twitter Advanced Search , a set of filters that allow you filter tweets by location, keywords, and dates. You can also use TweetDeck (a free online dashboard by Twitter itself) to set up columns to monitor certain searches. “People are so frequently really pleased, that this message they’ve been putting into the universe, someone has got back to them.”

As well as the most popular social media platforms, I also use Reddit to find more niche groups. For example, when I did a series on incels , Reddit was an apt place to find such subcultures. You can follow all the subreddits you like – and provided you’re not breaking any admin rules – you can reach out to suitable people via this medium.

“There are literally millions of people on there talking about millions of things,” agrees Amelia Tait, who covers cultures, trends, and the internet. “From one in a million rare diseases, to people making their own languages, to really intense fandoms.”

“Anything you’re writing a story about, you can find a case study on Reddit who is already talking about this issue organically. People on Reddit are surprisingly open to talking about their experiences, because they’re already there looking to have a conversation.”

Amelia suggests using a Google Site Search rather than using Reddit’s own tools to find relevant communities, as the social media company’s results are often poor. She also recommends using language specific to a certain region to help find UK case studies in a global subreddit. For example, searching for the word “mum” or “colour” is likely to show up less people based in the US.

She also recommends reaching out personally, rather than just posting a message or messaging the moderators as a whole. Don’t be surprised if a Redditor also wants to check who you are too. Thanks to the anonymous nature of the site, you may need to gain people’s trust.

“You can say here’s a similar article I wrote, here’s my tone, my style my approach. Verifying you are who you say you are, if you’re verified on Twitter, send them a message, or from the email address that’s on your website. It’s all about treating people as people.”

Finding case studies is one thing, but what about the experts you need to help put the story into context? We’re delighted to have partnered with ResponseSource as our 2021 sponsor, who have the perfect tool to help bring experts to you instantly. No, really.

The Journalist Enquiry Service is completely free to use, and allows you send a request to hundreds of relevant experts, charities, and PRs. You’ll be able to detail exactly what you want, how you’d like to hear back from them, and your deadline.

A spokesperson for the service tells Journo Resources: “More than 30,000 journalists and broadcasters use ResponseSource and our Journalist Enquiry Service to secure essential insight, information and connections from a selected range of trusted and reliable contacts.

“It puts you in touch with experts, case studies and PR contacts from all sectors, saves you hours of research and helps you meet your deadlines.”

Try It Out For Yourself Here

I am also part of several Facebook groups of various persuasions – ranging from weddings to cats, families to budgeting. Honestly, there’s a Facebook group for everything .

Even if you’re not actively looking for a case study, they’re a great place to hang out which have helped me come up with story ideas and find the right person to speak to. If you join and are requesting comment, just make sure you’re being very upfront about what you need and what you’re planning to do with the information.

Dr Lily Canter, a money and health journalist who also co-founded Freelancing For Journalists , says there’s no one set way to find a case study. “If it’s a consumer story and it’s around fuel and energy, then I will probably go and find niche Facebook groups. So that’s normally a starting point. If I’m looking for something very specific, I might go on a forum like Money Saving Expert, I can find people that are already having those conversations about the issues I’m writing about.”

Looking For Case Studies Beyond Social Media

Social media platforms can be a great tool for journalists, but there are other platforms, both on and offline that can be just as useful for journalists.

Aina J Khan , a New York Times International Fellow, recommends checking crowdfunding, charity and campaigning sites like GoFundMe, Change.org, JustGiving or the Government’s own petition website .

“I always find my case studies though researching lots,” she tells Journo Resources. “The example that I can think of was last year when I wrote a piece for The Guardian, about a Filipino nurse who died of suspected Coronavirus whose body couldn’t be found . His niece was trying to locate the body, and I found her on GoFundMe. The only reason I found out about what happened with her, and then pitched the story and got it commissioned, was because I reached out to her and had seen that she was trying to raise funds.”

Aina J Khan (L) and Lily Canter (R)

“I think there’s an ethical kind of question here as well, because in case studies like these, they’re really traumatic, they’re really heartbreaking circumstances. So I didn’t necessarily start out as ‘let me find the most disgusting or the most traumatic thing’. No, it just comes up through conversations through people that I’m talking to, researching plenty, and it just goes from one thing to another. A good habit to find strong case studies is just picking up the phone and talking to people that you’ve worked with.”

Aina also stresses that talking – and listening – to people within your own community can be one of the valuable ways of finding case studies. Speaking about a story she broke about how the first four doctors to die of Covid-19 being Muslim , she says: “How I got that was, a friend had flagged it up and asked if I’d noticed it.”

“I knew another friend who works for the British Islamic Medical Association, I reached out to him and was like, ‘Do you know anything about this?’ And one thing led to another. He knew one of the doctors who passed away and confirmed he was Muslim. Then I reached out to other people through social media to confirm the background of the doctors. Social media is actually really useful. I found the story because I saw that as kind of a gateway into actually going and exploring more. It’s definitely something I should do more of, because that’s how you get your stories.”

As a new journalist, it can feel intimidating to just start reaching out to people. But, as Lily advises, practice is the only way: “It can be a little bit daunting, the idea of reaching out to people that you don’t know. But the more you do it, the easier it becomes. And reaching out to case studies is really is essential, as a journalist, there’s no way around it. But it’s just the case that you have to keep on doing it and build contacts.”

This content is editorially independent and put together by the Journo Resources in-house team. It was funded and made possible through the support of ResponseSource, one of the UK’s leading services to help connect journalists and PRs .

One of their key tools for journalists is the Journalist Enquiry Service , which helps thousands of journalists connect directly with experts, charities, companies and PRs, to give them the information they need quickly. It’s a completely free tool

Find out more and manage your own requests here .

A Day In The Life Of… Carla Jenkins, Social Media Journalist of The Times Scotland

Misinformation & Fake News

Getting Started

Practice: Case Studies

Widely shared fake news stories from 2020-23, widely shared fake news stories from 2016-18, fake news exercise.

Types of Misinformation
Legitimate News Sources
Books & Articles
Video Resources
Other Resources
Case Study 1
Case Study 1 - Explained
Case Study 2
Case Study 2 - Explained

On August 20, 2022, a TikTok video was posted, claiming that Disney World was going to lower the drinking age to 18. It was stated that Disney World was battling the Florida government in court to get a resort exemption, which would allow anyone 18 and older to drink on property. The TikTok video acquired millions of views in just a couple days. This story was also posted on facebook, instagram, and Twitter. Shortly after, the story made it on ABC 10 News.

The video originated from an article posted on a blog called Mouse Trap News. Small segment of the original article below. Full article can be found here: "Drinking Age at Disney World May be Lowered to 18".

The Claim: Walt Disney Company was seeking a resort exemption to lower the drinking age to 18 years old, in Disney World, Florida.

To find the truth about this story, we will use Michael Caufield's Four Moves and a Habit.

1. Check for previous work: For this case, we looked up this claim on Snopes ( fact checking resource ). They published an article on the story and labeled it as fake news satire. It was also aired on ABC 10 News, on their fact or fiction segment, where it was determined to be fiction. The news segment can be viewed here .

2. Go upstream to the source: The TikTok video originally came from an article published by the same TikTok user, @mousetrapnews. They have their own webpage dedicated to news stories about disneyland parks. The original article claimed that Disney was battling Florida in the courts over the minimum drinking age, but no evidence such as sources or court filings are mentioned.

3. Read laterally: Upon further exploration of the site itself, their About page actually bluntly admits that they only write fake stories about Disney Parks (see picture below).

4. Circle back: If we go back to the main article explaining the story, it reads in the description an explanation of the National Minimum Drinking Age Act passed by congress and signed into law by President Reagan. The article then asks the reader a question "Didn’t think you would get a history lesson from us, did you?" and "Now that we have set up the act, we have some Disney news to go with it.", these playful comments already makes the story a little suspicious. We can also check another form of social media the user has. They also had an Instagram account, where they state "Real Disney News That is 100% Fake" and "The Onion Of Disney News".

Interestingly enough, many of the Mouse Trap News fake news stories have been featured on different news websites and shows, such as The Associated Press, USA Today, and on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon .

The Conclusion: The Walt Disney Company did not seek a resort exemption to lower the drinking age to 18 years old, in Disney World, Florida.

In October 2020, posts on social media and articles were published claiming that a new CDC study found the Majority of those infected with COVID-19 ‘always’ wore Masks (examples of the articles below). This claim was further elevated on October 15, 2020, a town hall broadcast by NBC, interviewed U.S. President Donald Trump. During this interview Trump stated, " But just the other day, they came out with a statement that 85% of the people that wear masks catch it." Trump's source for this claim was the new study published by the CDC. Full transcription of this interview can be found here. This information was ultimately, misinterpreted. Below is the CDC's tweet addressing the misinformation.

The Claim: CDC reported that the majority of those infected with COVID-19 ‘always’ wore masks.

Check for previous work: For this case, we looked up this claim on Snopes and FactCheck.org ( fake news fact checker ). Both resources claim the information as false and misleading.
Go upstream to the source: The claim originated from a study published by the CDC titled, Community and Close Contact Exposures Associated with COVID-19 Among Symptomatic Adults ≥18 Years in 11 Outpatient Health Care Facilities. This study examined how SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, may be transmitted both within communities and between close contacts. While Trump used the correct percentage from the study, the data was misinterpreted. The study reported that 85 percent had reported wearing masks always or often. The study also found that for those in the group who had tested negative, 89 percent had reported wearing masks with the same frequency. The CDC pointed out that "People w/ and w/o COVID19 had high levels of mask use in public. Even for those who always wear a mask, there are activities where masks can’t be worn, like eating or drinking. People w/ COVID-19 were more likely to have eaten in a restaurant." The study noted, "Exposures and activities where mask use and social distancing are difficult to maintain, including going to locations that offer on-site eating and drinking, might be important risk factors for SARS-CoV-2 infection."
Read laterally: The claim is challenging the notion that wearing a mask is not effective at preventing the spread of COVID-19. We have to take in consideration that this study was investigating mask wearing in community activities. CDC's website provides Science Briefs which is a summary of the scientific evidence used to inform specific CDC guidance and recommendations. In one brief , they state, "individual prevention benefit increases with increasing numbers of people using masks consistently and correctly." So, the people from the original study might have not been using their masks effectively if repeatedly taking them off in social settings. Other medical experts such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, states "Masks aren't perfect. They help, but they're not a guarantee that you're not going to get Covid if you wear a mask”.
Circle back: If you find yourself getting overwhelmed by other sources on the claim, circle back to the claim and investigate the background of that source. Using the AllSides Media Bias Chart , we can see that The Federalist is listed on the very, far right side of the chart. The author of that article, Jordan Boyd, has her twitter page linked to her name and we can see that her posts are on the far right of the political spectrum. The California Globe is listed as a conservative leaning publication on Snopes, many of their other posts written by the author lean to the right of the political spectrum. You can also circle back to the original study the claims were based on and question the accurateness. One issue with the study is the data was self-reported through phone surveys. So, people could have inaccurately reported mask use since there was no video monitoring to confirm.

Check Your Emotions: The use of masks and its effectiveness against COVID-19 was a highly politicized topic when the pandemic started. By downplaying the severity of the virus (despite all the losses recorded by the CDC), President Trump's attitude about the pandemic and the use of masks contributed the view that the COVID-19 public health crisis should be viewed as a political issue.

Conclusion: The CDC did not report that the majority of those infected with COVID-19 ‘always’ wore masks.

For more examples on COVID-19 myths and using Michael Caufield's Four Moves and a Habit to fact check them, visit our COVID Vaccines Libguide.

Jan. 6 Capitol Riot
COVID-19 and Vit. C
Adrenochrome Shipment
RNA in Chicken Feed

The Claim: The U.S. Capitol police gave the protesters an "okay" to enter the Capitol.

Check for previous work: For this claim, we looked up this claim on Factcheck.org (fake news fact checker). Factcheck.org debunks the story here.
Go upstream to the source: this claim originated from a video clip that was posted all over social media. This video clip was posted by a group of Trump supporters who attacked the United States Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., after U.S. President Donald Trump did not win the 2020 presidential election, on January 6, 2021. They uploaded a video where shows a police officer “appears to tell” the group that they wouldn't stop them from entering the building. However, nowhere in the video does the police make that claim. A fake news website called, The Gateway Pundit, reported the same claim on Facebook and Instagram. Even a radio show in Texas called “Walton & Johnson,” ran a similar headline.
Read laterally: the next step would be to see what others are saying about this claim. In this case we should look at what the police officers in this video clip said about the incident. US Capitol police officers said in an email statement to factcheck.org , that the officers were blocking the whole way and attempting to de-escalate the situation by telling the crowd to not attack or assault and to remain calm. The Justice Department reported that about 140 police officers were assaulted that day.
Circle back: If you find yourself, getting overwhelmed by other sources on the claim, circle back and investigate the background of that source. If we look back to the actual incident on January 6, 2021, we know from ample public evidence released by the FBI showed Trump supporters violently assaulting officers at the Capitol. Other shown footage included Trump supporters breaking through a metal barrier outside the capital and breaking windows of the building to enter.

Conclusion: The U.S. Capitol police never gave protestors permission to enter the Capitol.

The Claim: High doses of vitamin C can cure COVID-19.

Check for previous work: Throughout the year 2020, many websites and social media posts were claiming how high doses of vitamin C could cure and/or be an effective treatment for COVID-19. For this case, we looked up this claim on Snopes (fact checkering source) which they claim the information as false and misleading.
Go upstream to the source: These claims stemmed from multiple studies detailing how vitamin C can help support the bodies immune system. According to Harvard Health Publishing , vitamin C has some marginal benefits for the common cold, such as reducing the duration of symptoms, if it is taken before catching a cold. Those benefits can be achieved with a diet that includes 200 milligrams of vitamin C, which is easily obtainable with a daily diet that includes fruits and vegetables .
Read laterally: To gain additional background on this claim, we can read multiple sources and this this case see if it has been tested in trials. The CDC ultimately reported that there was insufficient evidence for the panel to recommend either for or against vitamin C for the treatment of COVID-19 and non-hospitalized patients. Most of the trials had a limitation such as small sample sizes, study designs that had different doses or formulations of vitamin C and different outcome measures.
Circle back: If you find yourself, getting overwhelmed by other sources on the claim, circle back to the claim, and investigate the background of that source. In this particular claim, there is some truth and vitamin C is good for your immunity. However, some of the hype around these claims came from unpublished sources, fake news, personal websites, and from "influencers" on social media. We can refer to the CDC website and peer review published articles about the relationship between COVID-19 and vitamin C. Clinical trials can be found on the ClinicalTrials.gov website.

Conclusion: doses of vitamin C are not a proven as an effective cure for COVID-19.

Claim: Putin intercepts adrenochrome shipment

1. Check for previous work: In this case if we looked for "adrenochrome putin shipment" to check for previous work, we would find that politifact.com already did a fact check on this story.

2. Go upstream to the source: This example is from Real Raw News . This website is known for fabricating stories; if that's information you knew coming into this evaluation, you would know this is an automatic red flag and we could stop here. However, if you didn't know that, you could make a few judgements about what other stories are on the page to get a sense of the angle and political bias for this news source. If you research Andrei Zakharov, whose name was used as a source of information, you'll find that he is a Russian journalist that works for the BBC Russian Service, not as Russian FSB Agent. As a story featuring adrenochrome and blood harvesting with a history of conspiracy theories behind it, you should already be skeptical. Looking up some of the facts in the story help us determine more about its truthiness.

3. Read laterally: Given what we've learned from steps 1 and 2, at this point in the evaluation we could stop our search, dismiss the story, and move on with our lives. However, if we aren't satisfied with what we found, out next step is to look for other stories about this issue. Are other reports of this story coming from reputable sources? Is the story reported elsewhere with the same facts? Are there discrepancies in what's being reported? This is the step where we need to be paying extra attention to who's publishing the story that corroborates this narrative. On the internet you can find pretty much anything you look for, but "anything" isn't always an accurate story to trust.

4. Circle back: There's plenty of facts within this story for us to investigate and check. However, we eventually want to come to a conclusion and circling back will bring us to the question of whether this story has any truth. Given what we've learned: no, this is not factual.

Check your Emotions: The habit we're practicing throughout is about checking our emotions. Do I want this story to be true? Does this story sound too outrageous to be true? Am I attached to what the truth about this story is one way or another?

The Claim: chickens are not laying eggs, because RNA is being added to commercial chicken feed.

Check for previous work: For this case, we looked up this claim on politifact.com. This resource debunks it here.
Go upstream to the source: The claim originated from a published research article titled, " Messenger RNA sequencing and pathway analysis provide novel insights into the biological basis of chickens’ feed efficiency. " This study aimed to characterize the biological basis of differences between chickens with low and high feed efficiency, with a long-term goal of improving the ability to select for feed efficiency. Nowhere in the article did it mention adding RNA to chicken feed. RNA sequencing was being used to see how differences in feed efficiency can be explained by what levels of RNA are produced by the chickens' cells.
Read laterally: The next step would be to see what others are saying about this claim based on the article. PolitiFact actually did many email interviews with experts in the field, to talk about the claim. Multiple experts said commercial feed manufactures were not adding RNA to chicken feed, and that this claim was a misinterpretation of the data. The FDA also confirmed that RNA is not on its own, a feed additive. The articles cited from the original TikTok video are not relevant to the argument made in the video. The FDA also stated that there are many ways why a chicken's egg-laying behavior and quantity could change. They recommended consulting a licensed veterinarian, who can examine the animal and take a detailed medical and diet history.
Circle back: If you find yourself, getting overwhelmed by other sources on the claim, circle back to the claim, and investigate the background of that source. The first thing one should question is how RNA is being referred to in the post. RNA stands for ribonucleic acid, which is a naturally occurring nucleic acid found in all living cells. So, the claim of adding synthetic RNA into commercial feed does not make any sense. Furthermore, a search can be done to confirm what common factors are affecting chicken egg laying. Common reasons listed were management practices, improper nutrition, parasite infection, disease, lighting, and stress.

Conclusion: RNA is not being added to commercial chicken feed.

Trump Bills Michelle Obama
"Pizzagate"
Donald Trump Wins the Popular Vote
Hillary's Health
Muslims Demanding Handouts
Burning Tipis at Standing Rock
Student Desecrates Constitution

This example is from Before It's News; it's also featured on at least one other similarly fake website. The amounts supposedly owed by the Obamas are pretty unbelievable. Even if the presidential couple had indeed bought everything the article claims they did, the total would not come anywhere close to $11 billion, a figure equal to the GDP of a small country. It also includes some grammatical issues, and "eleventy" isn't a word.

It's also worth looking at the Before It's News site itself:

A few points:

"Alternative," "Spirituality," and "Unexplained" are terms that one doesn't find among the tabs on any legitimate news site.
No professional news organization lets just anyone "upload news."
The presence of advertising, and the nature or quality of the products being advertised, is not a sound indicator of the site's reliability. Ads for Duracell batteries and Mapquest could quite conceivably show up in the margins of The Seattle Times ' website , for example. Newspapers, in both their print and online versions, generally cannot survive without ad revenue.
This site deals heavily in sensationalist headlines (the ones underlined are just some of the most outrageous).

Among the most notorious fake news stories of 2016 was one alleging that Hillary Clinton was running a child-prostitution ring out of a Washington, D.C., pizzeria. This had real-world consequences for the employees of that pizzeria when an armed man decided to "self-investigate" the rumors, as described in "Dissecting the #PizzaGate Conspiracy Theories," by Gregor Aisch, Jon Huang, and Cecilia Kang.

During the 2016 election, another persistent fake news story was that Donald Trump won both the popular vote and the electoral college vote. That Trump won the electoral college by a clear margin is undisputed. While the federal government did not release the official results of the popular vote until mid-2017, a great number of sources, ranging from the more conservative The Wall Street Journal to the more liberal The New York Times reported Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote by margins ranging from approximately a million votes (on Nov. 9, 2016) to three million (NYT estimate as of Feb. 10, 2017).

During the 2016 presidential campaign, fake news sites circulated several stories alleging that Hillary Clinton was in poor health, the implication being that she was not fit enough for the rigors of the presidency. Fake news site 70News dedicated an entire section to these rumors, most of which were bolstered by photos or video clips showing Clinton in moments of apparent frailty or disorientation. This illustrates a common fake news tactic: the use of tidbits of truthful imagery to support exaggerated or unsubstantiated claims. Laura Mallonee writes about this phenomenon in " How Photos Fuel the Spread of Fake News ."

Not all fake news is geared toward a conservative audience; liberals may be just as quick to believe falsehoods that seem to confirm their hopes and fears. A February 2017 story run by Alternative Media Syndicate claimed that police forces arrayed against the pipeline protesters at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation raided and burned a protester camp, offering graphic imagery of flaming tipis as proof. This story is completely false; the image was taken from a 2007 HBO film, Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee . Snopes.com debunks the story here .

In February 2018, after surviving a shooting in which 17 of her schoolmates died, Florida teenager Emma Gonzalez became an outspoken proponent of gun control legislation. Not long after, imagery of her apparently tearing up a copy of the U.S. constitution went viral on right-wing websites. This imagery was doctored ; the originals came from a Teen Vogue photo shoot in which Gonzalez symbolically tore up a target sign. Photo manipulation is a time-honored propaganda tactic, but is now easier than ever thanks to Photoshop and other editing tools.

Robert Amnor story

Work in groups of 3-5. Using any methods you can think of, try to determine whether the story is (a) false, (b) true, or (c) a mix of truth and falsehood. Go back to the home page of this guide if you need some direction on what to look for.

Discuss which (if any) of the fake news hallmarks from the first page of this guide are evident in this story.

<< Previous: Getting Started
Next: Types of Misinformation >>
Last Updated: Apr 16, 2024 12:19 PM
URL: https://libguides.lib.cwu.edu/fakenews

The New Rules of Political Journalism

In this election, the reporting strategies of the past will not be enough.

Screens prepared to broadcast at a caucus night watch party with former US President Donald Trump in Des Moines, Iowa

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In our digitally chaotic world, relying on the election-reporting strategies of the past is like bringing the rules of chess to the Thunderdome.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic :

The October 7 rape denialists
Finding justice in Palestine
Biden’s safe, polite campaign stop in Scranton

This past weekend, I was on a panel at the annual conference of the International Symposium on Online Journalism, in beautiful downtown Austin. Several journalists discussed the question: Are we going to get it right this time? Have the media learned their lessons, and are journalists ready for the vertiginous slog of the 2024 campaign?

My answer: only if we realize how profoundly the rules of the game have changed.

Lest we need reminding, this year’s election features a candidate who incited an insurrection, called for terminating sections of the Constitution, was found liable for what a federal judge says was “rape” as it is commonly understood, faces 88 felony charges, and—I’m tempted to add “etcetera” here, but that’s the problem, isn’t it? The volume and enormity of it all is impossible to take in.

The man is neither a riddle nor an enigma. He lays it all out there: his fawning over the world’s authoritarians, his threats to abandon our allies, his contempt for the rule of law, his intention to use the federal government as an instrument of retribution . Journalists must be careful not to give in to what Brian Klaas has called the “ Banality of Crazy .” As I’ve written in the past, there have been so many outrages and so many assaults on decency that it’s easy to become numbed by the cascade of awfulness.

The former White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer points out a recent example in his newsletter: On a radio show earlier this month, Donald Trump bizarrely suggested that Joe Biden was high on cocaine when he delivered his energetic State of the Union address. It was a startling moment, yet several major national media outlets did not cover the story.

And when Trump called for the execution of General Mark Milley, it didn’t have nearly the explosive effect it should have. “I had expected every website and all the cable news shows to lead with a story about Trump demanding the execution of the highest military officer in the country,” this magazine’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, told The Washington Post . “If Barack Obama or George W. Bush had done so, I’m sure [the news media] would have been all over it.” (Trump’s threats against Milley came after The Atlantic published a profile of Milley by Goldberg.)

In our digitally chaotic world, relying on the reporting strategies of the past is like bringing the rules of chess to the Thunderdome. There has, of course, been some progress. The major cable networks no longer carry Trump’s rallies live without context, but they still broadcast town-hall meetings and interviews with the former president, which boost ratings. NBC’s abortive decision to hire Ronna McDaniel, a former chair of the Republican National Committee, as a contributor, despite her role in spreading lies about the 2020 election, highlighted the disconnect between this moment and much of the national media.

And then there is the internet. It is certainly possible that richer, more insightful media will emerge from the digital revolution, but we’re obviously not there now. Back in 2016, we worried that social media had become a vector for disinformation and bigotry, but since then, we’ve seen Elon Musk’s extraordinary enshittification of X. In 2016, we worried (too late) about foreign interference and bots. In 2024, we are going to have to contend with deepfakes created by AI.

This year will see some of the best journalism of our lifetime. (You’ll find much of it here in The Atlantic .) But because both the media and their audiences are badly fractured, much of that reporting is siloed off from the voters who need it most. Because millions of Americans are locked in information bubbles, half of the country either won’t see important journalism about the dangers of a second Trump term or won’t believe it.

As Paul Farhi notes in The Atlantic , MAGA-friendly websites have experienced massive drops in traffic, but social media continues to thrive on negativity and providing dopamine hits of anger and fear. And of distraction—last week, the most-liked videos on TikTok about the presidential race included a video of a man singing to Biden and Trump’s visit to a Chick-fil-A .

To put it mildly, the arc of social media does not bend toward Edward R. Murrow–style journalism.

So what’s to be done? I don’t have any easy answers, because I don’t think they exist. Getting it right this time does not mean that journalists need to pull their punches in covering Biden or become slavish defenders of his administration’s policies. In fact, that would only make matters worse. But perhaps we could start with some modest proposals.

First, we should redefine newsworthy . Klaas argues that journalists need to emphasize the magnitude rather than simply the novelty of political events. Trump’s ongoing attacks on democracy may not be new, but they define the stakes of 2024. So although live coverage of Trump rallies without any accompanying analysis remains a spectacularly bad idea, it’s important to neither ignore nor mute the dark message that Trump delivers at every event. As a recent headline in The Guardian put it, “Trump’s Bizarre, Vindictive Incoherence Has to Be Heard in Full to Be Believed.”

Why not relentlessly emphasize the truth, and publish more fact-checked transcripts that highlight his wilder and more unhinged rants? (Emphasizing magnitude is, of course, a tremendous challenge for journalists when the amplification mechanisms of the modern web—that is, social-media algorithms—are set by companies that have proved to be hostile to the distribution of information from reputable news outlets.)

The media challenge will be to emphasize the abnormality of Donald Trump without succumbing to a reactionary ideological tribalism, which would simply drive audiences further into their silos. Put another way: Media outlets will need all the credibility they can muster when they try to sound the alarm that none of this is normal . And it is far more important to get it right than to get it fast, because every lapse will be weaponized.

The commitment to “fairness” should not, however, mean creating false equivalencies or fake balance. (An exaggerated report about Biden’s memory lapses , for example, should not be a bigger story than Trump’s invitation to Vladimir Putin to invade European countries .)

In the age of Trump, it is also important that members of the media not be distracted by theatrics generally. (This includes Trump’s trial drama, the party conventions, and even— as David Frum points out in The Atlantic —the debates.) Relatedly, the stakes are simply too high to wallow in vibes, memes, or an obsessive focus on within-the-margin-of-error polls. Democracy can indeed be crushed by authoritarianism. But it can also be suffocated by the sort of trivia that often dominates social media.

And, finally, the Prime Directive of 2024: Never, ever become numbed by the endless drumbeat of outrages.

Political analysis needs more witchcraft.
Right-wing media are in trouble.

Today’s News

The Senate dismissed the articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and ruled that they were unconstitutional, ending his trial before it got under way.
House Speaker Mike Johnson will proceed with a plan, backed by President Joe Biden, to vote on separate bills to provide aid to Ukraine, Israel, and U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific. The proposed move has raised criticism from some conservative representatives.
Four Columbia University officials, including the president, Nemat Shafik, testified in a congressional committee hearing about student safety, free speech, and anti-Semitism on campus.
The Trump Trials : The first days of the criminal case against Donald Trump have been mundane, even boring—and that’s remarkable, George T. Conway III writes.
The Weekly Planet : The cocoa shortage could make chocolate more expensive forever, Yasmin Tayag writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Something Weird Is Happening With Caesar Salads

By Ellen Cushing

On a November evening in Brooklyn, in 2023, I was in trouble (hungry). I ordered a kale Caesar at a place I like. Instead, I got: a tangle of kale, pickled red onion, and “sweet and spicy almonds,” dressed in a thinnish, vaguely savory liquid and topped with a glob of crème fraîche roughly the size and vibe of a golf ball. It was a pretty weird food. We are living through an age of unchecked Caesar-salad fraud. Putative Caesars are dressed with yogurt or miso or tequila or lemongrass; they are served with zucchini, orange zest, pig ear, kimchi, poached duck egg, roasted fennel, fried chickpeas, buffalo-cauliflower fritters, tōgarashi -dusted rice crackers. They are missing anchovies, or croutons, or even lettuce … Molly Baz is a chef, a cookbook author, and a bit of a Caesar obsessive—she owns a pair of sneakers with “CAE” on one tongue and “SAL” on the other—and she put it succinctly when she told me, “There’s been a lot of liberties taken, for better or for worse.”

Read the full article.

Sugar millers lobby for more exports of commodity

Finance minister sees pakistan’s forex reserves around $9-10bn by june 2024, 10 pakistani textile firms shine at techtextil and texprocess 2024, karachi port receives $50mn upfront payment from ad ports group, gold prices fall rs7,800 per tola in pakistan , suzuki pakistan is all set to be delisted as danka finally…, pakistan’s electric distribution companies desperately need privatisation. what is taking so…, how the building of lucky one mall became a case study…, what went down during the finance minister’s visit to the states,…, hands off the rupee, managing exits; how to fire an employee, value trapped, the sifc and the dar problem, board composition – do you have the right people for your…, instagram surpasses youtube in ad revenue, turkish fintech unicorn papara set to acquire sadapay in possible $50mn…, openai launches sora, a new ai model for generating videos, apple to launch new ai-based code completion tool, productive policies or pr fluff — how useful were the interim…, how the building of lucky one mall became a case study in the mistreatment of minority shareholders.

Minority shareholders have no one looking out for them. Case in point, the Lucky One Mall

Minority shareholders are sometimes treated like step children in the capital markets. They are constantly ignored and are seen as being a necessary evil that has to coexist. Due to this, they have little to no voice in the corporate corridors while the regulators have few tools to resolve their issues.

A classic case of this mistreatment can be seen taking place in 2014. The Board of Directors of Fazal Textile Mills decided to sell off the Lucky One project it was undertaking. What followed can form a case study on the way minority shareholders are treated and how there is little to no regard for their rights in the corporate landscape of the country.

To read the full article, subscribe and support independent business journalism in Pakistan

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we are with minority shareholders

I love this posting.

Dates of secp Investigation and Court judgment along with Judges names should be included

I fully support the rights of minorites in Pakistan. No difference should be among majority and minorities.

In Pakistan mafias is the authority

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